Les Chansons célèbres à l'écran - 1931
ABOUT THE FILM : Les Chansons célèbres à l'écran
Cinémathèque françaiseFamous Songs on Screen
Year: 1931
How do you preserve part of the heritage sung in cafés where singers entertain customers? By bringing them to the screen of course! And here’s how La boiteuse du regiment, La femme du roulier and Tout l'pays l'a su, famous songs from the popular French repertoire are to be found at the cinema on film and set to music. La boiteuse du régiment belongs to barrack-room comedy where a soldier pines for a beautiful lame woman who prefers to visit the officers rather than the soldiers, the la femme du roulier is desperately looking for the latter in all of the town’s taverns; in tout l'pays l'a su you have a whole village gossiping, always on the lookout for spicy, malicious bits of gossip.
These songs that have been brought to screen are a sort of ancestor to video clips, made possible with the arrival of speaking film.
Nationality: French
Length: 13' 56"
Genre: music
Sound: sound
Original elements: black & white
Composers: Polin, Charles Borel-Clerc
Original language: French
A BRIEF HISTORY : Les Chansons célèbres à l'écran
La Boiteuse du régiment was written and sung by Polin (1863-1927), a famous singer in Parisian cafés where singers entertained the customers. His speciality was barrack-room humour that relied on a few well-seasoned effects like misunderstandings or jokes between soldiers regarding rank; a humour that sometimes teetered on (mild) sauciness. Polin sang his songs wearing the pre-First World War French army uniform; baggy madder red sheepskin trousers and a blue jacket, the kepi buttoned up the wrong way making him look both naive and cunning, hence his nickname of “France’s first dough-boy”. Polin sang hundreds of songs but most of them have been forgotten, unless cover versions were done of them like the Boiteuse du régiment.
La femme du roulier... but in fact, what is a cart driver? According to the definition in the Littré, a cart driver is a “common driver on land who transports goods on carriages”. This song featured among the repertoire of the Caveau des oubliettes rouges club situated in the oldest courtyard of Paris at n°11 rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in the Latin District. The roots of this song, of which there have been several versions ranging from the tame to the smutty with versions that can even be found in Canada, seem to come from another popular song La femme d'un libertin (the wife of a libertine). Here La femme du roulier is performed by Jane Pierly (1887-1977) nicknamed the “queen of song” by the regulars of the Parisian music hall the Chat noir.
Tout l'pays l'a su or how a whole village gossips triumphantly in unison. This song composed by Charles Borel-Clerc (1879-1959) and written by Alibert (1889-1951) sets the idiosyncrasies of a small village to music where nobody misses a trick, everybody knows everything and above all nothing is kept to oneself. Alibert specialised in this kind of song that is somewhere between fantasia and operetta to sing about France and its villages just after the First World War.
Produced by the Eclair studios, Les chansons célèbres à l’écran (Famous songs on screen) benefited from Tobis/Klang’s scoring process, which was one of the first scoring processes with optical sound.
