Albert Capellani (1874-1931) had already directed nearly fifty films for Pathé-Frères and S.C.A.G.L. (Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens des Lettres) before L’Épouvante, the first film he did with Mistinguett. Described by the press as a “terrifying cinemadrama,” Decourcelle’s original script served as an exemplary vehicle for Mistinguett and her co-star Milo by restricting its action to a very short period of time and to just a few adjacent spaces. In a self-referential gesture (later characteristic of her films with André Hugon), she plays herself as a well-known, but unnamed, music hall actress, who returns to her apartment one evening to find a thief in her bedroom. After he grabs her jewelry and flees out a balcony door, she calls the police, but the thief eludes them and ends up hanging precariously from a balcony gutter. After the police leave, she goes to the same door and extends a drape over the railing so that the thief can clutch it and haul himself to safety. The two shakily come to an agreement — she allows him to go free, and he returns her jewelry — one performer rewarding the other.
L’Épouvante is remarkable in several ways. First, it has only four intertitles, two of which succinctly introduce the characters: Mistinguett, in a luxurious white fur, leaving a theater to get into a waiting car, and Milo casing her bedroom, hearing a sound, and hiding under her bed. Later, another sound cue will let Mistinguett discover and rescue Milo. Second, the extended sequence in which the police pursue him, uninterrupted by intertitles, is confined to the narrow balcony running alongside the apartment and to the steeply sloping roof of what turns out to be a five-story building. Relatively quick cutting keeps the pursuers and pursued proximate yet constantly separate, with closer shots adding to the suspense by linking spectators with Milo and his predicament. Third, the initial sequence in the bedroom includes several shots that are simply extraordinary for 1911. After Mistinguett takes off her jewelry, kicks off her shoes, and climbs into bed, she tosses aside a book, reaches for a cigarette, and looks down at a dropped match. Suddenly, the camera dollies back, distancing the spectator from her and accentuating her vulnerability. An overhead shot past her head then frames the thief’s hand emerging from under the bed and snatching the match. The shock of that shot closes the distance between spectator and character with almost Hitchcockian intensity.
Although perhaps lacking the fever pitch of Griffith’s last-minute rescue films, L’Épouvante certainly belies the widely held notion that the French cinema was incapable of producing exciting action films. Especially in its unique framing and editing strategies, this film is nearly the equal of Lois Weber’s and Phillips Smalley’s Suspense (1913).

Richard Abel