This is a 100-second short film from the early days of cinema. This is also why it is obviously still silent and in black-and-white. A hotel employee keeps spying through keyhole and he sees a beautiful woman with long dark hair, a woman who is actually a man in drag and other interesting situations. This is basically all there is to this very short movie, but still I'd say it is a successful attempt at comedy, also with the ending where he gets punished for what he did. It's certainly funnier than most other films from the late 19th century and this is quite a success I'd say. Not a bad watch, almost a must-see for those interested in the days of Méliès, Guy and Lumière. Thumbs up.
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Horst_In_Translation28 October 2015
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A hotel worker looks through keyholes in his workplace and sees several startling sights.
This is an early example of matte work, in which the shape of the image on on the screen is changed, not through set decoration, but by changing the outlines of the image. In this case, appropriately enough, the image is defined as a circle with the lower half of a triangle beneath.
Mattes are still used occasionally, as when some one looks through binoculars and the field of vision is restricted to two co-joined circles.
This was a popular and saucy subject for peep-shows and was remade a couple of times. Ferdinand Zecca made a more elaborate version of it in 1901, with almost no change save a more elaborate ending. -
JoeytheBrit22 April 2020Decent early short comedy that combines 'what the butler saw' comedy with a comment on the illusion of female beauty.
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Michael_Elliott21 September 2018Peeping Tom (1897)
This here is a pretty simple film as we start off seeing a man sweeping in a hallway before he then starts to peep into the keyholes. Inside the keyholes we get to see what the people are doing. If you're a fan of these older films then you know that as the decade wore on we got more and more scripted ideas. This thing here was obviously scripted and on that level alone it is somewhat interesting even if nothing we see in the keyhole is all that special. I guess you could say this was an early erotic picture as the first keyhole appears to have been meant to excite men but what follows isn't all that special.