Tired of his nephew Martino’s dissolute lifestyle, Pancrazio promises him a reward of 100,000 lire on condition he gets married. To avoid yielding to bribery but still pocket the money, Martino hires Polidor to dress up and pretend to be his fiancée, Titina Sgambetti. When he goes to his uncle’s to introduce his future wife, he becomes infatuated with his cousin Jolanda, while Pancrazio falls in love with Titina/Polidor. Pancrazio then offers 100,000 lire to his nephew to leave Titina, and the same amount to Titina to marry him instead of Martino. Both gladly accept the generous offer, and the film ends with an official engagement and a marriage.
Ferdinand Guillaume had already made and acted in a film with the same title in 1912, for Pasquali (180 m.). The actor-director was not new to this kind of process: during his career he often made remakes of his most successful films, the later versions sometimes sharing no more than the title and/or comic concept on which they were built. Moreover, most of Guillaume’s output was based on his circus repertoire, which was rooted in a long family tradition. This was what happened with Tontolini ballerina (Cines, 1910), shot anew in 1913 for Pasquali with the title Polidor ballerina, and reflecting the public success of his cross-dressing character.
After his break with Cines at the end of 1911, Guillaume was unable to keep using Tontolini as the name of his comic persona, but he succeeded in turning the situation to his advantage: in the years that followed he made his own new versions of several of the titles he had already played in for the Roman production company (mostly directed by Anton Giulio Antamoro), rechristening them with the name Polidor.
Guillaume was neither the first nor the only film comic to play en travesti (suffice it to mention Leopoldo Fregoli, Brunin, or Fatty Arbuckle), and he had also donned women’s clothing in Polidor vedova allegra (Pasquali, 1914). Yet there’s something about this second version of Polidor cambia sesso that exists beyond the surface comedy. Given the Italian context of the 1910s it would certainly be unrealistic to speak about it as a “progressive” film… or maybe not. After all, it foregrounds same-sex marriage in an era when no one could have imagined it.
As in most Italian silent comedy, the editing doesn’t reach the American pace of a Mack Sennett, but the camera angles are varied (mid-length and long shot, half-length and medium close-up), and Polidor – with his individual mimicry and acrobatics – lends a sense of dynamism to the single shot, balancing out the relatively static edits. In just a few short minutes Ferdinand Guillaume succeeds in both amusing us and amazing us with his modernity. – Elisa Uffreduzzi