Les deux orphelines

Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon's 1874 stage melodrama — two orphaned sisters, one of them blind, torn apart in the Paris of the 1780s — was already a global property when Albert Capellani filmed it for SCAGL-Pathé. Released in January 1910 as Pathé no. 1753, twenty tableaux, the short condenses Henriette's abduction and Louise's fall into the hands of the beggar-woman La Frochard into the pictorial grammar of the film d'art: painted décors, theatrical blocking, and the moral clarity of the boulevard stage. Griffith would take the same play to feature length as Orphans of the Storm in 1921; Capellani's version is the earlier French claim on the material, made at the moment Pathé was teaching audiences that a famous title could be a reason to buy a ticket.