Pardon the French Polygamizing the Chase; It’s Not Personal

Ten Wives for One Husband isn’t a Francized remake of the American Mutoscope & Biograph’s parody of Mormon polygyny that is A Trip to Salt Lake City (1905), but is rather another plagiarization of Biograph’s chase comedy Personal (1904). Plus, that's an odd English translation of the French title, Dix femmes pour un mari, as it’s actually a chase of wannabe brides, but whatever. Like Lubin’s remake, Meet Me at the Fountain, if not also the Spanish version, The Heir of the Pruna House (both 1904), and the ultimate brides chase of Buster Keaton's Seven Chances (1925), it appears that this Pathé release is also more specifically a copy of a copy that was the first rip off of Personal, Edison’s overly-long-titled How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the ‘New York Herald’ Personal Columns (1904). The source of a lawsuit and due to Biograph’s two-tier distribution system at the time, the Edison film beat the original to the general market and was likely the more-often seen of the two. I’ve discussed as much in my reviews of those titles, but suffice it to say here that the telltale sign is the shared opening medium shot where the groom is preening in front of a mirror, which was original to the Edison remake.

(And contrary to what one might read on the internet, by the way, he doesn’t look like Max Linder.) (Also, despite internet databases listing three directors for the title, I’ll assume early film historian Georges Sadoul was right in attributing primary credit to former Lumière cameraman Georges Hatot, whom it’s claimed came to specialize in chase comedies.)

Comparatively, this seems a bit of a return to form in that it’s eight shot-scenes, which is similar to the ten of the original and nine of the Edison film and considerably fewer than the 16 of the Lubin film and 14 of the now-incomplete Spanish film. On the other hand, some of the cuts appear awkward to today’s understanding of continuity editing, which of course they were only just inventing back then, but that’s also more so the case with the other two later remakes, the Lubin and the Spanish ones. Biograph and Edison actually consistently abide what would later be known as the 180-degree rule—mostly with figures tending to enter from the background and upper part of the frame and exit in the foreground and bottom part of the frame. Here, though, there’s an awkward cut and bit of staging around the meeting place of a park pavilion between shots two and three, and later the action will tend to enter a scene from the same direction that it exited the last shot from, as if the camera hopped to the opposite side of the axis of action.

Otherwise, like the American films, and as opposed to the Spanish one, this one tends to follow the “operational aesthetic” of every figure being shown entering and exiting the frame before the shot-scene is complete. The ending is disappointing in its lack of comedic violence relative to its predecessors. The couple even shake hands upon the bride’s conquest in catching up with the groom before the other women. The entry and exit of all the figures through a horse carriage in shot four, however, including a bit of camera panning to show one of the brides falling off the carriage, was ingenious. It’s obvious that filmmakers of the story film in its infancy were learning and innovating through imitation. If you will, a rather mirrored and repetitiously creative polygamy.