Hurray! Billeting!
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Hurray! Billeting! |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1913 |
| length | 24 (today) approx. 30 (1913) minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Franz Hofer |
| script | Franz Hofer |
| production | Max Maschke for Luna-Film, Berlin |
| camera | Gotthardt Wolf |
| occupation | |
| |
Hurray! Billeting! is a German silent film fun play from 1913 by Franz Hofer .
action
first act
Somewhere in the German province. Franchon Morteau, the spoiled and notoriously delighted daughter of a country estate owner, spends the day with all sorts of gimmicks and jokes. In the opening scene she blows soap bubbles into the air, in which the faces of her possible admirers appear. While the first one is too old and ugly and too fat for her, she likes the next bubble admirer, a young, dashing lieutenant , exceptionally well. When she tries to grab the soap bubble with the young officer , the curtain suddenly opens and stern Mr. Papa stands in front of her. Franchon turns away disappointed. Now, to top it all off, her father wants to offer a suitor as future husband who corresponds exactly to the fat, ugly guy of the first soap bubble. Franchon defends himself with his hands and feet, laughs at the clumsy cavalier and unceremoniously hits him on the head with the bouquet he has been given. Then a postillon conveys the message: There will be billeting ! Six attractive, young lieutenants are to be accommodated in the stud. The three young women present are happy: "Two for each!"
Mr Morteau is anything but enthusiastic about it. He fears a constant erotic temptation that this billing could mean for his good daughter and plans to lock her up for the time of billing. Together with the other two girls from the stud, Franchon decides to dress up as a peasant girl in order to be able to spend a lively rendezvous with the young officers without compromising each other. Two of the three young women quickly disguised themselves in young farmers' wives and, as a precaution, left a farewell letter in which they wrote to the landlord that they had left the farm because of his bitterness. Franchon watches her father read the letter closely and smirks to himself. But her father lures her to the barn's hayloft and locks her up there so that she is safe from the desires of these approaching lieutenants. She begs and pounds on the gate, which is locked from the outside, but her father remains tough as iron: "I'll get you out of here at night when the lieutenants have gone to bed." Franchon can see through a heart-shaped peephole in the wall of the barn, just like them Officers come ridden into the estate.
Franchon's first call for help is unsuccessful, and it is only with the help of an older officer boy that she can abseil down from the hayloft to the ground with a load train. She even manages to talk a slightly intoxicated person off his uniform and puts it on. Shortly afterwards, Franchon meets her friends again, disguised as peasants, who are amazed at Franchon's appearance. Then suddenly the lieutenant appears out of her soap bubble, scares away the two “peasant girls” and first of all squeezes the “officer boy” that is flirting in his eyes. Franchon can hardly contain himself with laughter now. As the officer's boy, "he" is taken to the lieutenant's quarters and has to do all sorts of boy services, such as taking off the lieutenant's boots. Something promptly breaks. Finally, the lieutenant also wants his pants off. When the "boy" Franchon loses his soldier's cap, the lieutenant recognizes who he is looking at and, like Franchon, finds this extremely amusing. Both disappear behind a screen.
Second act
The next morning Franchon's father wakes up with a huge headache because, like most of the men present on the property, he was uninhibitedly drunk. Then it occurs to him, hot and hot, that he has locked his little daughter in the hayloft all night. Franchon, now again in her appropriate young girl outfit, serves her officer and companion through the night with coffee for breakfast. The two other young women, who had disguised themselves as peasant girls, also woke up in the presence of the other five officers and are putting their disheveled sleeping quarters in the hay back in order. When Morteau sees the seven stand up, he struggles with his hands for composure, well knowing that his little daughter could have fallen victim to this “den of sin” as well.
Soon there will be a general party, the young women and the smart officers are dancing, while the landowner Morteau is racking his brains over how he can end the whole billeting as quickly as possible. Then he has a brilliant idea: he steals a horn from one of the officers' boys who are sleeping off their intoxication in the barn and blows loudly to the attack, whereupon all soldiers jump up, take up weapons and uniforms to follow the orders and ride into the field. When he believes that all the soldiers have withdrawn, Father Morteau climbs up to the barn attic to finally unlock his daughter again. When he doesn't find her up there and comes down again, a buxom peasant girl laughs at herself and lets the landlord believe that his daughter went among the soldiers and went out with them. The old man asks for a horse to first catch up with his daughter and then bring him back. But she has just been told about the same event by her lieutenant lover, who had observed the scene of her father with the stolen alarm horn, and they both poured out laughing.
The women who lost their soldier dance partners during the exuberant celebration now begin to make a virtue out of necessity and continue their dancing pleasure alone. Franchon and her lieutenant, who did not fall for the trumpet trick, continue to dance when the angry host appears and demands an explanation from the officer for what he sees as inappropriate behavior. The lieutenant suggests that he saw through Morteau's horn swindle and that his daughter Franchon has now become very fond. Grudgingly, the landlord gives his daughter to the perky Lieutenant Franchon.
Production notes
Hurray! Billeting! was made in the late spring of 1913 in the Berlin Luna Film Atelier at Friedrichstrasse 224. The film was censored on July 2 of the same year and premiered in August 1913. The two-acter was about 550 meters long.
For almost 26-year-old Gotthardt Wolf , this was one of his first jobs as chief cameraman.
criticism
A century later, the assessment of this film said: "" Hurray! Billing ", a very early example of trouser roles, shows how precisely the male domain of the military invites to disguise and travesty."
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c This name is mentioned in the surviving Dutch version, but does not necessarily have to match the role name of the German original version.
- ↑ Thomas Brandlmeier in CineGraph: Early German Comedy Film 1895–1917