Sideshow Wrestlers (French: Le Conseil du pipelet ou Un tour à la foire, literally "The Janitor's Advice, or A Visit to the Fair") is a 1908 French shortsilent film by Georges Méliès. It was sold by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 1159–1165 in its catalogues, where it was advertised as a bouffonnerie extravagante (an "extravagant buffoonery").[1]
Plot
On the encouragement of his friend, a lodging-house janitor, a man goes to try his luck sparring a professional wrestler at a fairsideshow. He watches some of them at work, including a exaggeratedly sturdy woman wrestler who completely flattens her opponent. Finally he is pitted against an extremely tall wrestler, and manages to come out victorious.
The film has been known to survive since at least the 1970s, when John Frazer's book Artificially Arranged Scenes described its action but misreported the French title as High-Life Taylor (the French title of a lost Méliès film, Up-to-Date Clothes Cleaning). The confusion around the films' bilingual titles was cleared up in a Centre national de la cinématographie publication a few years later.[2]
References
^Malthête, Jacques; Mannoni, Laurent (2008), L'oeuvre de Georges Méliès, Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, p. 236, ISBN9782732437323
^ abcEssai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film; suivi d'une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France, Bois d'Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, 1981, p. 310, ISBN2903053073