''Rogues' Tricks'' (french: La Douche d'eau bouillante, literally "The Shower of Boiling Water"), also known as ''The Burglar's Bath'', is a 1907 French
short
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silent comedy film by
Georges Méliès
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (; ; 8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) was a French illusionist, actor, and film director. He led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema.
Méliès was well known for the use of ...
. The film stars Méliès as the comic foil of two rogues who break into his house and evade his attempts to capture them.
Plot
Two
vagrant
Vagrancy is the condition of homelessness without regular employment or income. Vagrants (also known as bums, vagabonds, rogues, tramps or drifters) usually live in poverty and support themselves by begging, scavenging, petty theft, temporar ...
s break through a window into an opulently furnished house. They hide in a closet just as the owner of the house, a bearded gentleman, enters. The owner, astonished by the mess the vagrants have made, berates his housemaid. A
glazier comes in to fix the window.
As the glazier works, the vagrants escape into the bathroom. Hearing a noise, they jump into the empty bathtub and hide under the tub's wooden cover. The noise is the owner, coming in to take a bath; he lights a match to the hot water heater, and gets a jet of hot water pouring into the tub. The vagrants, taken by surprise, start to jump involuntarily, and the owner realizes they are there. He tries to contain them by sitting on the cover, but they wrangle free, and the owner lands in the bathwater.
The owner jumps out of the bathtub and runs in pursuit of the escaping vagrants, who again escape to the closet. The owner crashes into the glazier with a shatter of glass, fires off a rifle that hits his housemaid, and finally ends up in the closet, which topples over.
Production and themes
Méliès plays the owner of the house. Unlike his more famous fantasy films, ''Rogues' Tricks'' is purely a broad comedy; beyond some basic
pyrotechnics
Pyrotechnics is the science and craft of creating such things as fireworks, safety matches, oxygen candles, explosive bolts and other fasteners, parts of automotive airbags, as well as gas-pressure blasting in mining, quarrying, and demolition. ...
, the only
special effect
Special effects (often abbreviated as SFX, F/X or simply FX) are illusions or visual tricks used in the theatre, film, television, video game, amusement park and simulator industries to simulate the imagined events in a story or virtual wor ...
s are two
substitution splice
The substitution splice or stop trick is a cinematic special effect in which filmmakers achieve an appearance, disappearance, or transformation by altering one or more selected aspects of the mise-en-scène between two shots
while maintaining th ...
s used for editing purposes.
The film is a rare example of Méliès playing a character who is not in control of a situation, and who ends up foiled; another such example is his film ''
The Eclipse, or the Courtship of the Sun and Moon'', made later the same year. A Méliès guide published by the
Centre national de la cinématographie comments on this phenomenon: "When he plays the role of the Devil, he wins. When he represents Authority (here the owner, in ''The Eclipse'' the professor) he loses."
[
]
Release
The film was sold by Méliès's Star Film Company
The Manufacture de films pour cinématographes, often known as Star Film, was a French film production company run by the illusionist and film director Georges Méliès.
History
On 28 December 1895, Méliès attended the celebrated first publi ...
and is numbered 909–911 in its catalogues. It was sold as ''Rogues' Tricks'' in the United States, and as ''The Burglar's Bath'' in the United Kingdom;[ A restoration supervised by David Shepard, with a ]Photoplayer
The photoplayer is an automatic mechanical orchestra used by movie theatres to produce photoplay music to accompany silent films.
Operation
The central instruments in a photo player were a piano and percussion; some machines also added pipe o ...
musical accompaniment by Joe Rinaudo, was released on home video in 2008 as part of a Méliès collection.
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
French black-and-white films
Films directed by Georges Méliès
French silent short films