The Kleptomaniac
About The Kleptomaniac
A well-dressed woman steals goods in a department store, is caught, and leaves with a lawyer's help. A poor woman steals a loaf of bread, is arrested, and is condemned while her daughter pleads. Porter cuts between the two cases in the store, the street, the station, and the court. The last shot is a tableau of Justice, half blindfolded, with a bag of gold outweighing a piece of bread on her scales.
Cast & crew
More about The Kleptomaniac
Edwin S. Porter directed and photographed it for Edison, and Wikipedia dates the February 1905 release at 10 minutes. Outdoor scenes use snowy New York streets, shot on a diagonal with a pan, in about eleven shots.
Themes
Background
The picture puts a department-store theft and a bread theft through the same police and court machinery and then judges them differently.
Reviews
Charles Musser treats the film as Porter's sharpest attack on class bias in American justice.
Look
Porter shot the snowy streets in depth and panned across them. Interiors of the store, the station, and the court stay in full shot.
Technique
Parallel editing sets the rich thief and the poor thief on matching paths before the allegorical last tableau.
Preservation
A print is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- Every shot is a wide or full shot. There are no close-ups.
- Charles Musser has called it Porter's most radical film for the way it condemns class bias in the courts.
- Kay Sloan describes the legal system in the film as harsh to the poor and easy on the rich.
- Miriam Hansen has compared the parallel cutting and the closing allegory with devices later used in Intolerance.
Scenes
- Store detectives stop the well-dressed woman and a lawyer gets her out.
- The poor woman is sentenced while her daughter begs.
- A half-blindfolded Justice holds scales on which gold outweighs bread.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (The Kleptomaniac (1905) - yt.webm)
