An Italian Straw Hat [Un chapeau de paille d’Italie] **** (1928, Albert Préjean, Olga Tschechowa, Geymond Vital, Paul Ollivier, Alice Tissot, Alexej Bondireff, Marise Maia) – Classic Movie Review 10,892

Director René Clair’s delightful 1928 black and white silent movie satirical comedy An Italian Straw Hat [Un Chapeau de Paille D’Italie], attacking the pettiness of the bourgeoisie of the 1900s, revolves around an Italian straw hat that has to be found to save the honour of a married lady, Anaïs de Beauperthuis (Olga Tschechowa).

The mayor Fadinard (Albert Préjean) is on his way through the woods to his marriage when his horse stops at a roadside bush and at the eats the hat of a married lady spending time behind a bush with her lover Lieutenant Tavernier (Geymond Vital), who orders Fadinard to replace the hat because the lady cannot return home hatless without being compromised. Naturally, the complications of Fadinard’s attempts to find the same kind of rare hat to save Anaïs’s honour greatly upset the schedule of his own marriage.

Vivid satirical characterisations, inventive visual humour and a precise sense of pace and timing, with period settings designed by Lazare Meerson, make this film one of the greatest comedies of the silent era.

Clair is making his feature debut at the age of 30, though he was at first unenthusiastic when Alexandre Kamenka of the Albatros film company offered him the job of adapting the 19th-century farcical play by Eugène Marin Labiche and Marc Michel for the cinema. But Clair transposed the 1851 period in which Labiche’s play was set to the Belle Époque era in 1895 (the year of the birth of the cinema) to try to make the satire more meaningful to a 1920s audience. Clair films in a style that recalls the techniques of the earliest cinema films, replacing the play’s verbal wit with visual comedy, and relatively few intertitles.

It is shot by Maurice Desfassiaux and Nikolas Roudakoff.

It was restored in 1952, with a new score by Georges Delerue, and again in 2016.

Also in the cast are Paul Ollivier as the deaf uncle Vésinet, Alex Allin as the valet Félix, Jim Gérald as Beauperthuis, Marise Maia as the bride Hélène, Valentine Tessier as a customer in the milliner’s shop, Louis Pré Fils as Bobin, the cousin with one glove, Alexis Bondireff as the cousin with a crooked tie, Alice Tissot as his wife, and Yvonneck as the bride’s father Nonancourt.

In the US it was released in 1931 and called either The Horse Ate the Hat or The Italian Straw Hat. In Italy, they were a bit more specific: Un cappello di paglia di Firenze [A Florentine Straw Hat], also in Germany: Der Florentiner Hut.

The running time is 108 minutes, 122 minutes or 112 minutes in the 2016 restoration.

Clair’s best known films include Sous les toits de Paris [Under the Roofs of Paris] (1930), Le Million (1931), À nous la liberté (1931), I Married a Witch (1942), and And Then There Were None (1945).

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,892

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