Perhaps no other comic character took greater joy in mischief and destruction than Léontine, known in the U.S. as Betty. Sadly, the actress who played her is still unidentified. This program features a number of the extant installments in the series, which spanned about 21 titles between 1910-1912. Léontine’s antics range from mild sight gags, such as depositing a red balloon inside a jar of Edam cheese, to anarchic acts of indiscriminate violence, involving the destruction of private property and extreme cruelty inflicted on family members and loved ones. In Le Bateau de Léontine (Betty’s Boat), she floods a hotel and destroys all the roofing and floorboards in her attempts to sail a toy boat in the bathtub. In other films, currently unavailable for screening, she throws firecrackers at her classmates and schoolteachers (U.S. release title Betty’s Fireworks), causing a massive conflagration by setting blaze to a stockpile of explosives. La Pile électrique de Léontine similarly lives up to the incendiary promises of its title.
Conflagration antics notwithstanding, Léontine’s weapon of choice is undoubtedly string, which she wields sadistically, tying human bodies and inanimate objects together until they all congeal into an amorphous, teeming mass hell-bent on violent retribution. In Les Ficelles de Léontine (Betty Is Still at Her Old Tricks), she lures unsuspecting victims into her web by baiting them with various commercial goods (e.g., a stuffed animal, a fake wallet, a basket of food), before subjecting them to ruthless physical violence and senseless volatile eruption. Whether using string to bring down her teacher in revenge for having tried to discipline her at spelling, as in Léontine en pension (unavailable for this program), or tying several men to a ladder and dousing them with black paint after escaping from her milliner boss in Léontine en apprentissage, Léontine’s string is a thing to be feared, even if merely used to mount an obtrusive air fan to the front of her bicycle (Ventilateur breveté /The New Air Fan). In other episodes, women’s skirt hems, millinery tassels, dog leashes, jump ropes, or dangling shoelaces serve just as well as string to torment her victims while remapping the entire world around her predilection for total destruction.
The function of the string becomes considerably darker toward the end of the series – from prankster device to gallows humor. In Les Malices de Léontine, after beating a dirty rug onto the head of her downstairs neighbor, she repurposes the string as a noose for strangulation, dangling the rope and fashioning it into a loop that nearly suffocates the hapless woman. Another episode further solidifies Léontine’s lack of implication in expectations of matrimony, motherhood, or domestic normativity, when she impulsively strangles a little girl and then beats her senseless with a jump rope in revenge for having accidentally tripped her. This film, Léontine garde la maison, presumed to be the final episode of the series, wraps up back in Léontine’s  home – which is simultaneously on fire and flooded with water – as it becomes chaotically overrun by all the stray dogs and orphaned babies in the neighborhood. (Léontine had posted a missing-persons ad in the newspaper after losing her “dog named Émile and her baby brother named Moustache.”)
From failed dog leash to averted umbilical cord, Léontine’s string is what drives the action and links the piecemeal antics together – while the raging lynch mob accumulates behind her. Again, after nearly asphyxiating her downstairs neighbor in Les Malices de Léontine, she wards off the angry horde by recruiting each new victim as a temporary obstacle, including a hysterical gentleman whose top hat she crushes, and a poor book vendor whose kiosk she destroys by tying the other end of the string to a temporarily parked automobile. (Though time is of the essence, Léontine cannot resist lingering to watch the gag explode before resuming her flight.) Léontine always narrowly escapes punishment, often by reclaiming her string. In Malices, she traps the mob pursuing her on a window washer’s balcony by locking the window and cutting down the only rope ladder. The film ends with an image of the victims’ faces, exploding with anger and thwarted vengeful passions. Similarly, Léontine nearly gets herself lynched after playing a series of violent pranks on the townsfolk in Les Ficelles de Léontine – escaping the gallows by trading places with a scarecrow mounted on a horse. Like many such slapstick bodies, Léontine was often just one failed prank or foiled trick away from horrific retribution and grisly annihilation.
Against the growing nationalism of the American film industry at the time, the Léontine/Betty series enjoyed transatlantic acclaim upon its initial release in the United States. As we know, the Americans love their “nasty women”! The Nickelodeon described Rebellious Betty (Léontine est incorrigible) in July 1910: “Betty’s antics and pranks are distinctly fresh and laughable, she is a mischievous and willful tomboy, who shrinks at nothing so long as she can get her own way.” (In this film, which we hope to screen in a future edition, Léontine sneaks into a cockfight, prods other spectators with a sharp metal rod, and then outwits the vengeful mobs, who’ve trapped her in a lion’s cage, by spontaneously mastering the art of lion taming.) Later that same month, Moving Picture World similarly hailed Betty: “If she is as vigorous, not to say destructive, in the entire series, few people or anything else will be left when the series is finished. The way she annihilates everything in sight because she can’t have her way is a caution… it will be unknown what misfortunes will follow her appearance.” However, by February 1911, the U.S. trade press had seen quite enough of Betty, with Moving Picture World condemning Betty Rolls Along as “One of those destructive comedies which has no merit beyond a species of horseplay, which should be banished from motion pictures.”
Léontine, youthful and slim, often appeared alongside her pal Rosalie, called Jane in America, played by the lithely rotund French comedienne Sarah Duhamel, whom David Robinson once described as a “Gallic Marie Dressler.” Rosalie et Léontine vont au théâtre features an iconic scene of the two hellions wringing out their tear-soaked handkerchiefs onto the heads of the bald men seated in front of them – and then laughing exuberantly at the wrong moments during a hokey amateur stage play. The two rabble-rousers team up again in Un Ravalement précipité, in which they efficiently sanitize an apartment by utterly defiling it. Meanwhile, Rosalie takes a cue from Léontine in Rosalie emménage, when she wins a fight against her new next-door neighbor over shared wall space by looping a dog’s leash and hanging him from it by the neck.
As Walter Benjamin has argued in a very different context, comedic and cartoonish film images offer spectators inoculations against mass psychosis. Therefore, with every effort to censor and suppress female sparkplugs such as Léontine/Betty and Rosalie/Jane, the pot boiled over, no doubt inflaming the rising geopolitical tensions that would erupt in world war, state genocide, and other senseless outbreaks of apocalyptic violence. I’m not saying that the repudiation of these comediennes was responsible for World War I, but if past is prologue, we’d do well to stay keenly attuned to the volatile historicity of our culture’s most anarchically “nasty women”.

Maggie Hennefeld

LE BATEAU DE LÉONTINE (Lotje’s Zeiljacht/Betty’s Boat) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod, dist: Pathé Frères (Pathé Cat. no. 4442). uscita/rel: 09.10.1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 97 m. (orig. 105 m.), 4’48” (18 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles; titolo di testa/main title: NDL. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Desmet Collection. Preservazione effettuata nel 1989 da un duplicato negativo/Preserved in b&w in 1989 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

LES FICELLES DE LÉONTINE (Betty en het Kluwen Touw/Betty Is Still at Her Old Tricks ) (FR 1910)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod, dist: Pathé Frères (Pathé Cat. no. 3696). uscita/rel: 1910. copia/copy: DCP (da/from 35mm, 134 m.; orig. 155 m.), 6’33” (trascritto a/transferred at 18 fps); did./titles: NDL. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Scansione effettuata nel 2009 da un controtipo negativo ottenuto nel 1995/Scanned in 2009 from a dupe negative made in 1995 at Haghefilm.

LÉONTINE EN APPRENTISSAGE (Betty Tries to Learn a Business) (FR 1910)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod, dist: Pathé Frères (Pathé Cat. no. 3914). copia/copy: 35mm, 621 ft. (= 189 m.; orig. 220 m.), 11‘ (16 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

VENTILATEUR BREVETÉ (The New Air Fan) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod: Pathé-Comica (Pathé Cat. no. 4346). dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 73 m. (orig. 80 m.), 3’33” (18 fps), col. (imbibito/tinted); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Preservazione effettuata nel 2010, da una copia nitrato dell’Archive Film Agency di Londra. /Preserved by EYE in 2010 at Haghefilm from a nitrate print from the collection of the Archive Film Agency (London).

LES MALICES DE LÉONTINE (Betty Enjoying Herself) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: ?. cast: ? (Léontine). prod, dist: Pathé Frères (Pathé Cat. no. 4788). uscita/rel: 1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 270 ft. (= 82 m.; orig. 95 m.), 4’30” (16 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

AMOUR ET MUSIQUE (Met Muziek en Hindernissen) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: ?. prod: Pathé-Nizza (Pathé Cat. no. 4192). dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 90 m. (orig. 110 m.), 5′ (18 fps); did./titles: NDL. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Desmet Collection. Preservazione del 2000 da un duplicato negativo del 1993/Preserved in b&w in 2000 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative made in 1993.

UN RAVALEMENT PRÉCIPITÉ (Rosalia, de Knappe Huisbewaarster/Precipitous Cleaning) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti. cast: Sarah Duhamel (Rosalie). prod: Pathé-Comica (Pathé Cat. no. 4485). dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 113 m. (orig. 115 m.), 6′ (18 fps); did./titles: NDL. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Desmet Collection. Preservazione in b&n del 1992  da un duplicato negativo/Preserved in b&w in 1992 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

ROSALIE ET SON PHONOGRAPHE (Rosalie en haar Phonograaf/Jane’s Phonograph) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti. cast: Sarah Duhamel (Rosalie). prod, dist: Pathé Frères (Pathé Cat. no. 4604). uscita/rel: 1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 81 m. (orig. 165 m.), 4′ (18 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles; titolo di testa/main title: NDL. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Desmet Collection. Preservazione in b&n del 2003 da un duplicato negativo/Preserved in b&w in 2003 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

ROSALIE ET LÉONTINE VONT AU THÉÂTRE (Betty and Jane Go to the Theatre) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti. cast: Sarah Duhamel (Rosalie), ? (Léontine). prod: Pathé-Comica (Pathé Cat. no. 4282). dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 79 m. (orig. 100 m.), 4′ (16 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.

ROSALIE EMMÉNAGE (Jane’s Moving Day) (FR 1911)
regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti. cast: Sarah Duhamel (Rosalie). prod: Pathé-Comica (Pathé Cat. no. 4135). dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 121 m. (orig. 130 m.), 6′ (18 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Preservazione in b&n del 2009 da un duplicato negativo/Preserved in b&w in 2009 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

LÉONTINE GARDE LA MAISON (Dolly Stays at Home) (FR 1912)
regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti. cast: ? (Léontine). prod: Pathé-Nizza (Pathé Cat. no. 4849). dist: Pathé Frères. uscita/rel: 1912. copia/copy: 35mm, 145 m. (orig. 155 m.), 8′ (16 fps); senza didascalie/no intertitles. fonte/source: Cinémathèque française, Paris.