Rigadin Napoleon
About Rigadin Napoleon
Rigadin is engaged to the young widow Madame de Bonafait, who keeps a little museum of Napoleon relics. He breaks a plaster bust and falls out of favor. An uncle’s legacy, a gray frock coat and another bust, arrives with a notary’s letter he misreads: he thinks the coat belonged to the Emperor. He wires his fiancée, falls asleep, and dreams he is Napoleon, drilling the troops in Swedish gymnastics and jiu-jitsu, speaking from the Pyramids, then facing Josephine, who wears Madame de Bonafait’s face, at Fontainebleau. He wakes, shows her the uncle’s old coat, and she throws the coat and the bust at his head.
Cast & crew
More about Rigadin Napoleon
Jacques-Marie Boutet de Monvel wrote the scenario. Pathé Frères produced and distributed the comedy. The Cinémathèque française dates the French release 26 September 1913. French Wikipedia gives the length as 340 meters, 11 minutes 20 seconds, in 35mm black and white. The Pathé catalog number on the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé record is 6090.
Themes
Music
Silent, with French intertitles.
Notes
- An alternate title is Napoléon et Rigadin.
- Max Charlier plays Napoleon. Pépa Bonafé plays Madame de Bonafait.
- In the dream Napoleon modernizes the army with Swedish gymnastics and jiu-jitsu.
- French intertitles.
Scenes
- Asleep in the uncle’s gray coat, Rigadin reviews the Grande Armée and then lectures it from the Pyramids.
- Madame de Bonafait throws the coat and the plaster bust at him when she sees they are not the Emperor’s.
Influenced by
- The Napoleon cult in French domestic life
