AT THE END of the silent era, in 1927, French director René Clair adapted a familiar stage farce into The Italian Straw Hat. Swamped by the arrival of sound, it foundered at the box office and was never seen in the United States in its proper form. Clair went on to establish himself as a masterful creator of talking comedies (most notably À nous la liberté). Now, thanks to the silent-era flame-keepers at Flicker Alley, The Italian Straw Hat has been properly restored and remastered.
We are so far now from the late ’20s that Clair’s sophisticated bit of homage to the earliest days of French filmmaking is hard to discern. Clair shot the story—about a man whose wedding day goes very wrong when his horse munches on a lady’s hat—in the costumes and style of the turn of the century, when Méliès and Lumière were inventing cinema. The acting is just broad enough but not histrionic, with Albert Préjean as the haggard groom and Vital Geymond as the hot-blooded lieutenant who demands the return of his married mistresses’s half-digested chapeau. One of the background characters sports a cowlick that rivals Martin Short’s Ed Grimley. At 115 minutes, the story flags a bit, but Clair’s touch is assured—and a bit of his celebrated surrealism (Entr’acte) pops up in a stop-action montage of furniture moving itself out of an apartment onto the street.
The DVD comes Clair’s 1928 short The Eiffel Tower, which salutes the famed landmark in a series of vertiginous traveling shots along the graceful struts and girders ending in a sweeping view of the city. Another short, by Ferdinand Zecca, from 1907, gives an idea of the early films that Clair was mining for The Italian Straw Hat.
The Italian Straw Hat
by René Clair
Flicker Alley
$29.95
