The Sunday Intertitle: The Further Adventures of the Liquorice Kid

More from The Late Show: The Late Movies Blogathon, the only blogathon in the world to feature only one blog.

One of Louis Feuillade’s last productions, PIERROT, PIERRETTE (1924) is a feature (just over an hour) that plays somehow like a short, with a tone Dickensian and Chaplinesque. When aging former ringmaster grandpa gets taken into an old folks’ home, Pierrot and Pierrette go on the lam: gramps encourages this, telling them to have adventures. The first adventure, it turns out, is starvation.

Pierrotte is a teenage René Poyen, the Liquorice Kid from JUDEX, elongated but still very recognizable. He’s adjusted his acting style to suit the twenties — he’s no longer so aware of the audience, doesn’t act things out for our benefit along. But he’s still one of nature’s aristocrats, even performing in a monocle. His little sister is played by an adorable and very natural kid called Bouboule, another Feuillade discovery.

Two surprisingly unpleasant bits of slapstick: in one scene, Bouboule intervenes in a fight between two big adults and gets tossed around like a rag doll — she is literally replaced by a doll to allow this, but Feuillade sets his camera back at a distance so it’s horrifyingly convincing. Poor Bouboule gets used as a bludgeon, then chucked ten feet through the air, magically turning back into a real girl on impact with terra firma. Later, a burglar gets a pitchfork in the throat, also played for laugh. He doesn’t seem to be suffering, or not as much as you’d expect.

Stealing from the best, Feuillade wraps his story up with an Oliver Twist housebreaking followed by somewhat unmotivated happy ending. It’s all quite cute.

I was intrigued to see whether Feuillade was moving with the times. Yes and no. He cuts a lot more within scenes than he did in 1916, when his approach was somewhat tableau-based. He even does regular shot-reverse-shot cutting. But he doesn’t edge the camera round for over-the-shoulders. Instead he creates a tableau with the actors facing front and then fragments it into closeups. This was perhaps slightly old-fashioned for 1923, but not severely outdated.

 

The Judex Files: The Look

Episode 2 of Louis Feuillade’s JUDEX introduces the Liquorice Kid (La Môme Reglisse), screen left, and we wonder how we ever got by without him.

The Liquorice Kid is one of nature’s aristocrats. A streetwise urchin on the side of good, he walks into the story, wedges himself there, and refuses to budge. There are perhaps elements of Chaplin to this minute hobo, but he’s also a sterling example of the deus ex machina device at its most charming. René Poyen, child star of Feuillade’s BOUT-DE-ZAN series of comic shorts, is an engaging little fellow. Like many of the characters in this serial which keeps a toe in theatre, he can turn to his chums in the audience and display what he’s thinking with facial expressions, gestures, or even silent utterances. But the Kid does this more often than the other characters — just like Chaplin, he enjoys a special relationship with his fans. We know he knows we’re watching, but the other characters are less aware that they’re in a movie. Even Judex doesn’t have the Kid’s cinematic awareness.

You might think constant knowledge that one is being observed by either a camera, or an audience of people ranging in period from 1916-2016 and possibly beyond, depending on how you imagine the Kid’s experience, might be distracting, might put one at a disadvantage. But the Kid is far from put off: basking in our admiration, he enjoys miraculous levels of self-confidence.