Hurra! Einquartierung!
About Hurra! Einquartierung!
Franchon Morteau, spoiled daughter of a provincial estate owner, blows soap bubbles that show suitors’ faces and hits an unwanted bridegroom with his own bouquet. A postilion announces that six young lieutenants will be quartered at the stud. Her father, afraid of the temptation, lures her into the hayloft and locks her in. She climbs down a cargo rope with a servant’s help, puts on a drunken officer’s uniform, and is taken for a boy orderly by the lieutenant she liked in the bubble. He sees her when the cap comes off. Next morning the father, hung over, remembers the lock. She is already serving that lieutenant coffee. He blows a stolen horn to march the soldiers out, then finds the loft empty. A peasant girl tells him his daughter left with the troops. The lieutenant, who watched the horn trick, asks for her. The father gives her over.
Cast & crew
More about Hurra! Einquartierung!
Franz Hofer wrote and directed this Luna-Film comedy in Berlin for Max Maschke. Gotthardt Wolf photographed. Manny Ziener is Franchon. Rudolf del Zopp is her father. Franz Schwaiger is the lieutenant. Karl Harbacher is billed; the German cast list does not name his part. A 1913 length of about 30 minutes is down to about 24 in the surviving print.
Themes
Making
Hofer stages the billeting farce in two acts: the lock-up, then the hangover. The uniform and the horn are the two props that move Franchon out of the loft and the soldiers out of the yard.
Look
Gotthardt Wolf shot the estate, the heart-shaped peephole in the barn wall, and the rope down from the hayloft.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
The surviving print runs about 24 minutes, against an original length near 30.
Notes
- The three young women on the estate greet the billeting with the line that there will be two lieutenants each.
- Franchon and two friends first try peasant-girl clothes and fake farewell letters before the hayloft lock.
- The father’s horn, stolen from a sleeping officer, is what empties the barn.
- The other two women spend the night in the hay with the remaining officers. He sees them in the morning and fears the worst for Franchon, who is already at breakfast.
Scenes
- Franchon slaps a bouquet onto the suitor her father prefers.
- He locks her in the hayloft and she watches the officers arrive through a heart-shaped hole.
- In a borrowed uniform she pulls off the lieutenant’s boots until the cap falls and he knows her.
- The father blows the horn, finds the loft empty, and still has to hand her to the lieutenant.
Also available
- Internet Archive (silent-hurra-einquartierung)
