Onésime, Post Office Employee
About Onésime, Post Office Employee
Onésime works the post-office window and ignores the line. He writes poems to a pretty customer and slips them into her mail while the people waiting throw tables and wicker trunks at him. She is married to a wrestler who is short of contracts. He finds the letter and comes to the counter. Onésime gets away by climbing into the pneumatic mail tube, and the chase makes him a hero of the P.T.T.
Cast & crew
More about Onésime, Post Office Employee
Jean Durand directed the Gaumont short, also called Onésime postier. The escape uses the post office pneumatic tube.
Themes
Making
Durand built the gag on a real piece of Paris machinery, the pneumatic dispatch, and on a set that could be torn up by the queue.
Preservation
A print survives. Wikimedia Commons carries a transfer under the French title, dated 1913 on that file.
Notes
- Ernest Bourbon plays Onésime. Mademoiselle Davrières plays the customer.
- Édouard Grisollet plays her husband, the wrestler. Gaston Modot stamps letters. Clément Migé is another clerk.
- The escape is into a pneumatic tube, the Paris post office's compressed-air mail.
- The French synopsis ends with him as a hero of the P.T.T., the postal and telegraph service.
Scenes
- Customers heave tables and wicker trunks while Onésime writes poems at the window.
- He dives into the pneumatic tube to get away from the wrestler.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Onésime employé des postes (1913).webm)
