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Two Films by Alice Guy-Blache
Jan. 2nd, 2021 07:35 amI was so taken with the Alice Guy-Blache documentary that I watched last week that afterward I went on another trawl of Youtube to see if I could find any films of hers that I haven’t seen. And I found two! Both had Dutch intertitles, which I translated with Google translate. This may be an official sign that I have gone Too Far in my quest for Alice Guy-Blache films, but here we are. (Neither one has a sound track, so I played Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake as background music, which of course was not tailored to the movies but was easier than watching them in absolute silence.)
The first is God Disposes, a melodrama about a young man whose parents disown him after he marries an actress. After he and his wife fall on hard times, the young man returns! intending to rob/murder his father!!! but the young man’s own son took the bullets out of the gun, so instead the young man and his father reconcile!!!!! I feel that I might be a little more leery of reconciling with a relative who had just tried to shoot me, but whatevs, the grandson is super cute so it’s worth it probably.
The other (my favorite) is Two Little Rangers, an action-adventure Western starring two girls in adorable divided skirts. Their father, the postmaster of this wild west hamlet, is attacked and thrown over a cliff by the local desperado. (Don’t worry, he’s fine after his older daughter lassos him and helps him climb to safety.) Burning for revenge, our heroines set off in hot pursuit of the desperado! He tries to hide in a cabin, but is forced to flee when the older sister sets it on fire with a flaming arrow, whereupon the younger sister (who appears to be all of twelve), gun in hand and murder in her eyes, forces him off the cliff.
This one is delightful. I loved our two little action-adventure heroines; there’s something especially delightful about the fact that they are basically just ordinary girls? They have no special powers, they are not in any kind of fantasy universe, they’re just regular girls avenging their dad.
The first is God Disposes, a melodrama about a young man whose parents disown him after he marries an actress. After he and his wife fall on hard times, the young man returns! intending to rob/murder his father!!! but the young man’s own son took the bullets out of the gun, so instead the young man and his father reconcile!!!!! I feel that I might be a little more leery of reconciling with a relative who had just tried to shoot me, but whatevs, the grandson is super cute so it’s worth it probably.
The other (my favorite) is Two Little Rangers, an action-adventure Western starring two girls in adorable divided skirts. Their father, the postmaster of this wild west hamlet, is attacked and thrown over a cliff by the local desperado. (Don’t worry, he’s fine after his older daughter lassos him and helps him climb to safety.) Burning for revenge, our heroines set off in hot pursuit of the desperado! He tries to hide in a cabin, but is forced to flee when the older sister sets it on fire with a flaming arrow, whereupon the younger sister (who appears to be all of twelve), gun in hand and murder in her eyes, forces him off the cliff.
This one is delightful. I loved our two little action-adventure heroines; there’s something especially delightful about the fact that they are basically just ordinary girls? They have no special powers, they are not in any kind of fantasy universe, they’re just regular girls avenging their dad.
