The Horse Ate the Hat (1928) User Reviews

tedium interspersed with moments of brilliance

[plaidpotato · 8/10 · 16 July 2003]

I should point out from the outset that I was probably in the wrong frame of mind for a movie like this. Today was a pretty extreme example of "one of those days" for me. I sat down to watch this, definitely wanting a laugh. But any movie was going to have to work extra hard to get a laugh out of me on this crappy day, and this one didn't really do the job. I should have probably gone with something simple and sure-fire, like a Buster Keaton movie, or a Woody Allen, or a Monty Python. Or maybe I should have just gone for a long bike ride. But I watched this instead.

This is one of those society comedies, with a large cast of characters, and various complicated goings on. Most of the humor derives from people trying to put a normal happy face on for the benefit of society, while meanwhile things are spinning out of control beneath the surface. It reminded me a little bit of Fawlty Towers, with John Cleese, for some reason. It's the same kind of humor. You've probably seen a lot of the gags in 10,000 TV sitcoms by now, but I suppose this stuff was a lot fresher in 1927. And most of it was pretty well done, I'll admit.

The story itself is simple, but you have to pay a lot of attention to keep track of all the moment-to-moment details. And I guess that's where the movie failed for me today. My mind kept wandering, and I'd have to rewind the tape to figure out what was going on, and I'd get annoyed. I was really feeling the lack of dialogue in this one. I watch a lot of silent films. They appeal to me for some reason I can't explain. But this movie felt incomplete to me. I felt it would have worked better as a talkie. But maybe it was just the mood I was in.

Anyway, there were several individual scenes that I thought were brilliant, and definitely made me sit up and take notice. One was worthy of a Seinfeld episode: it's a wedding scene; a woman notices her husband's necktie is undone, and she repeatedly nudges him and fiddles with her neck. The husband takes no notice. He sits there like a lump. But another character instinctively reaches to check his tie. This starts a chain reaction, and pretty soon everyone in the church is checking their ties, except for the husband, who's still sitting there oblivious. Another great scene is when the groom at the wedding imagines the angry military man back at his house, vandalizing everything, tossing all his possessions out the windows, tearing down walls--the film lapses into total surrealism; this is Rene Clair at his visual best. I love this scene.

For now, I'm going to rate this a 7/10. But I'll try to catch it again some day, when I'm in a better and more attentive mood, and I think I'll like it a lot better.

Not Enough Luck

[boblipton · 7/10 · 28 January 2011]

I just looked at Rene Clair's "An Italian Straw Hat" for the second time -- the first time in a dozen years and though I am now aware of potential issues with the viewing process -- like most late silent pictures, it almost certainly plays better with an audience -- seeing it by myself on my TV, it again falls a bit flat. The last time it was on a mediocre VHS copy. This time it was on the beautifully transferred Flicker Alley DVD.

This weakness surprised me the first time I saw it, since I am a great fan of Clair's sound films, as well as his silent short subjects, but I think I have identified at least part of the problem: I think Clair was directing under close supervision by someone who expected to see Labiche's play on the screen. As Clair's great films were always surrealistic, clearly in a world disjoint from the one we see around us, how could he be expected to to force the viewer into his own world? Even the way the characters are dressed and shot is typical of early French films -- one of the DVD extras is a Zecca short from 1906 or 1908, ""After the Wedding" and those characters were virtually dropped into Clair's picture -- so at least I now understand that we are dealing with then-current stage conventions.

Most of the movie looks as if it could have been directed by Louis Feullade: it has the placidly sardonic, observant camera, although it lacks the air of emotional reality that Feuillade's seemingly-improvised movies had: some of the wilder parts of LES VAMPIRE look as if he realized he had written himself into a corner, and there's one of his earlier movies in which the characters have to mail a letter, so they take a hot-air balloon to a mail box and I suddenly realized that the producer had given them a balloon and Feuillade used it because it would look cool and it was already paid for.

Albert Préjean, one of Clair's regulars at this point -- he was magnificent in "Sous les Toits de Paris" -- attempts the lead role with an air of depression. Unfortunately, while this may be appropriate to the character, given that he is watching his life unravel, the flat affect of depression is not terribly interesting for the audience.

It is only about two-thirds of the way through that Clair asserts his authority by showing us what's going on in Préjean's mind as houses begin to fall apart. But while this revived my interest, the tight plotting of Labiche's play took over again and I could see the wheels spinning neatly over the tracks of the story.

Ultimately, this is a superior silent version of an excellent 19th Century farce and should keep the dedicated silent enthusiast engrossed. However, for the fan of Rene Clair, it is a bit patchy.

I watched the movie with the Alloy Orchestra's soundtrack playing -- their arrangements are usually solid and supportive. If I enjoy a silent movie, I usually don't consciously notice the soundtrack, so the fact that I think that their polite-sounding orchestrations of late 19th and early 20th century program music is entirely appropriate is a bit of a put-down. It is certainly not their fault that I am familiar with one of the tunes through its use by Allen Sherman for one his comic rewrites: in this case, I kept hearing him singing his sardonic "Lots of Luck."

A funny silent movie.

[kamidesu · 8/10 · 4 March 2002]

I enjoyed this silent movie with a very good incidental live music in the theater. A man is going on his way home to prepare himself for his wedding, and his horse eats a hat, that belonged to a married woman. Her lover demands a new hat - she can't go home without her rare and uncommon "hat made of hay from Italy" - so our hero must find a new one, but remember, today he's going to get married, and the woman's lover threatens to destroy his house if he doesn't arrive on time ... will he find the hat?

Funny, but less than great, film of a reliable stage farce

[mgmax · 6/10 · 5 October 2006]

Report from Cinesation 2006: AN Italian STRAW HAT (***) Rene Clair had a huge reputation in the early days of sound, and though it's not hard to see why, it is hard to see why the same critics who loved his films (often voting them onto the early Sight & Sound lists of the best films of all time) were dismissive of great Hollywood comedies with exactly the same virtues. (A Nous la Liberte and Le Million are delightful, for instance, but in no way that Duck Soup and Top Hat aren't equally or more delightful.)

This-- based on a perennial stage farce about the complications that follow when a horse eats a married woman's hat while she's off dallying with her lover-- is skillful enough, and it has a few very funny moments, but made mostly in medium or longshot with little subtlety in the playing, it seemed far more primitive for 1927 than, to pick one American comedy, Kiki (shown earlier the same day)-- and the audience at Cinesation didn't laugh nearly as often, either.

The star here is definitely not the plot but the expert direction.

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 17 August 2011]

Silent film fans are really in for a treat with this DVD. Once again, Flicker Alley has released a terrific DVD--with a nearly pristine print (very rare for a silent), some nice special features as well as two different sound tracks for this movie! Each time I see one of their films, I marvel at the amazing care they give each release--and it's the class of the industry.

"The Italian Straw Hat" is film that was a bit short on plot but is still well worth seeing. This is because the director, René Clair, did a masterful job with this movie--with great camera-work and composition throughout. Unfortunately, despite looking great the plot keeps me from giving the movie an even higher score. The problem is that although the story is entertaining, it just had too many holes--too many situations that simply were too hard to believe and could have EASILY been resolved...but weren't.

The film begins with a bridegroom traveling by horse and buggy to his wedding. On the way, he gets out and his horse keeps walking--and finds a straw hat that it begins to eat! Naturally, the lady who owned the hat was angry and her lover was ready to fight. The bridegroom tried to pay for it but the couple insisted he find a replacement hat. And, they follow him into town and continue to insist--even moving into his apartment and threatening to destroy the place unless he get an identical hat. It turns out it's because the woman is married to a different man and doesn't want to have to explain to him what happened to the hat. But why the couple squatted for many hours in the house seemed forced--and why the bridegroom didn't just go to the police made no sense either. But, it did have lots of cute and mildly funny moments--even if the story just made no sense.

Overall, the film is expertly filmed but inconsequential because of the writing. It's worth seeing if you love silents or if you want to see a silent that manages to have very, very few intertitle cards yet tells the story very well. Otherwise, there are better silents out there--even with the great Flicker Alley package.

Sublime comedy

[insomnia · 10/10 · 26 September 1999]

I recently saw "The Italian Straw Hat" for the second time; on the silver screen yet! The plot is simple.A horse chews up a lady's straw hat.Her escort demands that it be replaced. This leads to all manner of complications. Slight? Perhaps. Funny? Absolutely hilarious - with not a word spoken!! If any reader gets a chance to see this film, or Clair's 'American' films - "The Ghost Goes West", "And Then There Were None", and: "I Married A Witch" - DO!

Breaking the logic of the places in Dadaist style

[luigicavaliere · 7/10 · 25 February 2019]

A woman is hiding with her lover in the bushes. The horse of the carriage of a promised husband, on the day of his marriage, eats her hat. The girl wants her hat to the point of fainting continually supported by the young man, to whom the lady's husband orders to find another identical Italian hat, threatening to break everything. The lover begins to break a statuette as a warning. At the wedding, the groom goes away to buy the hat followed by the bride's father, who takes away the young man who can find out where you can buy that type of hat. Among the wedding gifts there is a hat coming from Florence. The escapes and the pursuits, in addition to referring to the chase mechanisms of the first comic cinema of Sennett, Chaplin and Keaton, break the logic of the places in Dadaist style.

Brilliant

[Django6924 · 10/10 · 15 August 2005]

It has been a few years since I have seen this film, but at the time I rated it with the best comedies ever made, and filled with that graceful combination of high style and laugh-out-loud humor that seems to have disappeared from movie making except in an occasional rarity like Amelie--which to be honest, is more charming and touching than really funny.

Granted, comedy, more than any other genre, seems to be a matter of personal taste, but for those who can appreciate comedy that skewers and at the same time celebrates social mores. that relies on visual humor rather than jokes, and that doesn't need to resort to bathroom vulgarisms to get a laugh, then you might enjoy this film as much as I did.

But it's so slow!

[Igenlode Wordsmith · 5/10 · 9 August 2006]

I have to confess that I was left bemused by the warm, not to say rapturous, audience comments I overheard when leaving the cinema. I can easily credit that it benefits from a live accompaniment rather than whatever music was applied to the soundtrack on a home video release -- but I found the pacing of the film slow and verging on funereal, the plot a strained farce revolving around a comedy of 19th-century manners already outdated in the 1920s, and the characters so unsympathetic that I caught myself feeling gratified when it looked as if the seething husband was about to blow the deception wide open. There were times when I was in sympathy with the gentleman sitting at the end of my row, who intermittently let out choked snores before jerking awake.

The film has its moments, but overall I found it disconcertingly tedious -- shots seem to be repeated and lingered upon beyond humour, and for no clear reason. The opening scenes are a pretty fair sample of the pacing and style throughout, as the various members of the bridal party experience problems in dressing, in a sequence that feels as if it extends a good five minutes: it's mildly amusing, but it's mainly 'situation' comedy in which the characterisations themselves are supposed to be funny rather than anything they actually do, and it goes on and on. Similarly, in the finale, after the plot is unravelled in what seems intended to be the end, a series of half a dozen impressionistic epilogues follow one after another, with no sign of when the film is ever going to stop...

The mechanics of the farce depend on stock characters: the endlessly-fainting lady, the insanely insistent lover, the stone-deaf old man. Gags that are eventually funny -- e.g. the mass adjustment of ties during the civil ceremony -- are built up to via enormous layering and labouring of detail. The idiom is, I suspect, to me a basically alien one; but it's the timing that really hurts as far as entertainment goes. I don't care for slapstick, but this film goes to the opposite extreme -- clearly too sophisticated for my uncultured taste to handle.

A Classic, Stylized And Cynical Silent Comedy

[FerdinandVonGalitzien · 8/10 · 4 July 2009]

"Un Chapeau De Paille D'Italie" can be considered, by this German count's standards, as a transgressor silent film in spite of its classical conventionalism; this particular Teutonic riddle has a Germanic and even logical explanation that will be understood by the longhaired silent youngsters around the world right now.

"Un Chapeau De Paille D'Italie" was directed by the great but French silent director Herr René Clair in the silent year of 1928, after he had directed important, avant-garde, experimental and overall, non conventional silent oeuvres such "Entr'acte" (1924), "Paris Qui Dort" (1925), "Le Voyage Imaginaire" (1925) or "La Tour" (1928); so, having this in mind, then the Germanic assessment mentioned before by this Herr Graf has a solid basis. "Un Chapeau…" is a completely different and classic film in comparison with those earlier Clair films and this doesn't mean that "Un Chapeau…" is a minor work in Herr Clair 's career; on the contrary, the film is a remarkable, stylized and even provocative comedy.

The incident of the Italian straw hat occurs just before our hero marries, and leads to a series of well placed and paced episodes. The elegant and hilarious scenes depicting the troubles and crossed situations among the just married couple and their wedding guests with the adulterous couple, achieve very remarkable moments. The skillful use of the camera emphasizes the rhythm depending the different scenes, and includes the camera tricks and techniques that Herr Clair was so fond of. The result is a vigorous and sophisticated comedy with a irreverent undercurrent subject in the main plot: a just married man must assume the complicated task of protecting an adulterer.

Helping our hero in such a hazardous mission are excellent supporting actors, playing peculiar characters who are involved unnoticed in this peculiar wedding and will suffer the happenings around the Italian straw hat, a hilarious gallery of guests who have had the misfortune to be part of such a troublesome wedding.

The film is placed at the end of the old XIX century probably in order to take advantage of the human behaviours and fashion of those old times in which the ladies wore elegant hats ( those fräuleins of nowadays showing their loose hair in public!, Mein Gott! ). There is a careful atmosphere of ancient and decadent custom ( faithful characteristics, after all, in Herr Clair films ) that suits the film perfectly. Herr Clair has directed a "classic", stylized and cynical silent comedy that has the same original merits of his most experimental early works.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must find his Prussian helmet in order to eat his breakfast properly.

Underwhelming despite participants with potential

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 21 December 2015]

"Un chapeau de paille d'Italie" or "The Italian Straw Hat" or "The Horse Ate the Hat" is a French-German co-production from soon 90 years ago. Writer and director René Clair adapted a play by Marc Michel and Eugène Labiche for this 85-minute film. It is silent (don't be confused by soundtracks added later) and black-and-white what you would expect from 1928, even if sound films already existed at this point. Instead, there are French intertitles in here. This is mostly a comedy, but I cannot say I found this a particularly entertaining or engaging ones. Hardly no scene was funny in this one. Préjean, Vital and Tschechowa were among the most prolific actors from France (Tschechowa more from Germany) around that era, so they certainly brought some talent and experience. Still this did not turn out a memorable film at all. Clair is considered by many one of the finest French filmmakers in history. This film is no evidence for that theory. The whole hat story is ssimply not enough to carry this film for almost 90 minutes I have to say. Not recommended.

Hats off to René Clair.

[brogmiller · 8/10 · 4 November 2022]

Russian emigré Alexandre Damenka was the most successful producer of French cinema in the 1930's. This is the second of two adaptations made by René Clair of farces by Eugene Labiche for Damenka's Films Albatros both of which were released in 1928. The other is 'Les deux timides' which is actually the better film of the two but has been unjustly overlooked.

Written by Labiche in collaboration with Marc-Michel, the perennial favourite 'Un Chapeau de Paille d'Italie' has here been given the full René Clair treatment and confirms his mastery of film technique. He has successfully maintained the spirit of the original but has substituted the verbal humour with that of the visual whilst using title cards only when exposition requires. The clockwork precision, impeccable timing and the portrayal of definable 'types' by a superlative cast makes this an absolute joy to behold.

The cast is headed by Albert Préjean whose character is a far cry from the working class heroes he was to play in later films(best to draw a discreet veil over his Maigret) whilst classy Olga Tschechova has an hilarious scene where she faints a great deal. There are beautifully observed characterisations by Jim Gérald, Geymond Vital, Yvonnick, Alice Tissot, Paul Oliver and Louis Pré, amongst others.

Sets are by Lazare Meerson and although not credited as such, it is 'understood' that editing is by Monsieur Clair himself.

One is loath to agree with Pauline Kael but it is hard to dispute her verdict: "very simply one of the funniest films ever made."

Young Rene Clair's Clever Adaptation of an Old Play

[springfieldrental · 8/10 · 24 April 2022]

Adapting a silent movie from a stage play was one of the most challenging thing for a filmmaker to do since most plays have tons of dialogue. Talking pictures may be more suitable for adaptations, but for silent films, it was absolutely lethal.

Rene Clair knew the pitfalls when the young French film director was given the opportunity to handle the 1851 play 'Un chapeau de paille d'italia.' He initially cringed at how such a play could be brought to the screen about a groom, right before his wedding, has to find a replacement for a hat his horse ate. The farce is loaded with double-entendres, crisp witticisms, and lively chatter between its participants. On the stage, every actor is bursting with energy, frantic about the wedding, the search for the hat's replacement, the clandestine deception of a cheating wife, and the resolve to insure a marriage stays solid.

Clair used every imaginative visual trick up his sleeve to deliver the near-impossible in his January 1928 "The Italian Straw Hat," a.ka. "The Horse Ate The Hat." The 30-year-older pulled off what film critic Charles de St. Cyr claimed was a "comic masterpiece of French cinema." Clair updated the plot to 1895, the year cinema was introduced to the public. The update also gave the movie a sense of nostalgia, according to one film historian, where "scene after scene painstakingly and brilliantly captures the very atmosphere and flavor of pictures taken 30 years earlier, as when the Lumière employees walked out of their factory at lunch-time and were eternally caught and recorded by the motion picture in a sunlit moment of time." Film critics gave "The Italian Straw Hat" a hearty thumbs up, labeling it "simply one of the funniest films ever made." Clair replaces the verbosity of the original stage version to a palette of visual treats. His characters are identified by their traits they each demonstrate early in the movie. The bride's father, who has trouble fitting a small formal shoe into his larger feet, is always seen soothing his feet. The bride, whose aide loses a pin down her wedding dress, constantly reaches back in an attempt to remove it. A cousin has an uncooperative tie repeatedly drooping down, no matter how many times he tries to adjust it. These and many other identifying markers say more to describe the personalities than long descriptions.

Clair became one of France's most popular directors in sound movies. In "The Italian Straw Hat," he's already demonstrated a creative flair that will carry on as his career progressed.