Polidor ed i gatti - 1913
ABOUT THE FILM : Polidor ed i gatti
Museo Nazionale del CinemaPolidor and the Lions
Year: 1913
A litter of kittens disappears from the apartment during the absence of the owner who's gone off on business. Polidor, the distracted servant in charge of watching over them, wonders what to do. He comes up with idea of replacing the kittens with the first cats he comes across: lion cubs, barely larger than grown-up cats, stolen from a travelling circus, will do the trick. But as the months pass, the little creatures transform into big wild cats, and when the owner finally returns, the time comes to make a clean breast of things. As on other occasions in the filmography of Polidor, his taste for animals reveals itself in this short comedy.
Nationality: Italian
Actor: Ferdinand Guillaume
Length: 8' 57"
Genre: comedy
Sound: silent with soundtrack
Original elements: tinted
Producer: Pasquali & C.
Composer: Fabien Cali
Original language: Italian
A BRIEF HISTORY : Polidor ed i gatti
Already famous at Cines, which hired him in 1910 to play the part of Tontolini, Ferdinand Guillaume (1887-1977) becomes Polidor in a new comic series, produced by Pasquali & C. between 1911 and 1915. The arrival of the French actor in Italy coincides with the rise of burlesque films. During those years, the international success of André Deed (1879-1940) leads the great Italian companies to call upon actors who are often French. Stemming from a celebrated circus dynasty, son of a juggler and a horsewoman, Ferdinand Guillaume is a born acrobat before discovering in the cinema the greatest of all circuses.
Audiences quickly succumb to the charm of Tontolini, then Polidor, while the advertising pages become filled with titles of his films. A veritable comic duel then commences between him and André Deed, the two favourites of the Italian school of comedy, who were to meet only many years later, in the Joinville Studios, just outside of Paris.
As a true professional of mime, Polidor is constantly on the look-out for description. Action in his films becomes ever greater, as attested to by the pace of Polidor ed i gatti (Polidor and the Lions) which, playing on ambiguity, starts off with an apparently normal situation to end up with the apotheosis of disorder. Over and beyond his extravagances, Polidor reveals a special inclination for working with animals. Here, they're big cats; in Polidor ha rubato l'oca (Polidor has Stolen a Goose-1912) it's with the goose that he struggles, and in Polidor e l'elefante (Polidor and the Elephant-1913) our hero wins the favours of a touching elephant after he extracts a thorn from its foot.
Relegated to bit parts and even that of extras once speaking film arrived, Polidor performed increasingly on stage from 1920 by creating the Theatre of Laughter. In remembrance of the burlesque films where as a child he discovered Polidor at the cinema, Federico Fellini (1920-1993) made him his “mascot”. Thus the actor, omnipresent, played symbolic supporting roles in the films of Maestro including Nights of Cabiria in 1957 to Spirits of the Dead in 1968. Furthermore Ferdinand Guillaume directed nearly fifty short burlesque films for Italian cinema.
The original music for this film was composed by Fabien Cali in 2011 in the context of the call for proposals launched in partnership with the Sacem (Société des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs de musique – Society of authors, composers and music editors).
