The Skipping Cheese

Plot

Inside a crowded trolley car, a mixed assortment of passengers begins to react to an increasingly offensive smell that quickly disrupts the normal routine of the ride. As the odor spreads, everyone in the vehicle turns suspicious and starts trying to identify the source, creating a comic chain reaction of disgust, accusation, and embarrassment. Their search eventually settles on a cheese vendor who is riding along with her wares, and the discovery immediately transforms the situation from general discomfort into a focused public scandal. The gendarmerie is summoned to restore order, and the police forcibly remove the woman from the trolley and drag her off to the precinct, ending the scene in a mixture of slapstick humiliation and social satire.

Historical Background

The film was made in 1907, during the middle years of silent cinema's rapid expansion, when film was shifting from novelty attraction toward a more established commercial entertainment form. In France, Georges Méliès was one of the best-known filmmakers in the world, but he was increasingly competing with Pathé and other companies whose films emphasized realism, location shooting, and more complex editing. The Skipping Cheese reflects this transitional era by preserving Méliès's stage-based comic style while focusing on an everyday urban incident rather than fantasy or spectacle. Its interest to historians lies in how early cinema could compress social behavior, public embarrassment, and comic policing into a very short running time, revealing both the limits and the creativity of prefeature storytelling.

Making Of

The Skipping Cheese was produced during a highly prolific phase of Georges Méliès's career, when he was manufacturing short films in rapid succession for the Star Film Company. The filmmaking method was essentially theatrical: a painted set, a fixed camera, and performers arranged so the audience could easily read the comic escalation of the situation. This approach suited the film's premise, because the humor depends less on cutting and more on the synchronous behavior of a group in a confined space, making the trolley car feel like a miniature stage. No detailed production records have survived to document individual performers or specific shooting dates, but the film clearly fits the disciplined, studio-based production model Méliès used throughout the mid-1900s.

Visual Style

The film likely uses Méliès's standard early-1907 visual style: a fixed, frontal camera, a carefully arranged painted set, and tableau staging that keeps the action entirely readable in depth and width. The trolley interior is presented as a contained performance space, allowing the actors to express the comic build-up through gestures, body language, and group reaction. There is no evidence of complex camera movement or cutting, which is consistent with Méliès's established production methods for short comedies. The visual interest comes from the contrast between the ordered interior of the trolley and the chaos introduced by the smell and the ensuing police removal.

Innovations

The film does not appear to introduce a major technical innovation, but it demonstrates Méliès's refined mastery of single-shot comic staging and visual narrative clarity. Its achievement lies in the efficient use of space, timing, and crowd reaction to turn a simple sensory joke into a complete dramatic incident. It is also an example of how early cinema could render a social situation with great economy, using a single set and ensemble performance to sustain audience attention. In the broader context of Méliès's work, it shows the flexibility of his production model beyond fantasy and illusion-based effects.

Music

As a silent film from 1907, The Skipping Cheese had no synchronized recorded soundtrack. In original exhibition, it would typically have been accompanied by live music improvised or selected by a theater musician, often a pianist or small ensemble, with the exact accompaniment varying by venue. No original cue sheet or commissioned score is known to survive for this title. Modern presentations may use archival-style piano accompaniment or newly prepared silent-film scores depending on the distributor or archive.

Memorable Scenes

• The passengers in the trolley gradually realize that a foul smell is circulating through the car and begin reacting in exaggerated comic disgust.
• The collective effort to identify the source of the odor turns the entire carriage into a shared spectacle of suspicion and embarrassment.
• The gendarmerie physically removes the cheese seller from the trolley, turning a mundane nuisance into a slapstick police intervention.

What Critics Said

Contemporary critical documentation for this specific title is limited, and no detailed reviews from 1907 appear to be widely preserved. In the context of Méliès's oeuvre, such shorts were generally consumed as part of a large, popular program of tricks, comedies, and tableaux films, valued more for amusement and novelty than for formal criticism. Later film historians have treated it as a minor but telling example of Méliès's comic output, noteworthy for its social gag and its concise visual storytelling. Today it is appreciated primarily by silent-film scholars and archivists as part of the historical record of early French cinema.

What Audiences Thought

No audience-response records specific to The Skipping Cheese are known to survive in detail, which is common for short films from the silent era. Given Méliès's popularity in the period, it would likely have been received as a light comic item suitable for mixed programs and general audiences. The premise is broad enough to have been immediately legible to viewers of the time, with the smell gag and the intervention of the gendarmerie providing an easy payoff. Modern audiences typically encounter it as an archival curiosity or as part of retrospectives on Méliès's lesser-known work.