User Reviews

A man and his wife have a nice little racket of coining false money. While they go out to spend it, their daughter comes across a poor old woman and her daughter, without any money to buy a meat pie. She runs home and gets them one of the counterfeits...but the pie seller knows bad money.

It's an early one-reeler by Louis Feuillade, and he's already using the camera as a gimlet eye, looking upon human greed and crime with an unblinking eye, leading the audience to its own moral conclusions. Are we to admire the girl for her generosity? Her loyalty to her family? Or are we to condemn the lot of them for their natural human greed? The camera draws no conclusion in this one, although in coming days, matters will change.

"La fille du faux monnayeur," or "The Counterfeiters' Daughter," is an amusing Gaumont short that plays out like a 1907 version of an episode of the American TV series "Good Girls." It being about a seemingly ordinary family that's in the business of making fake money and constantly evading the law. The daughter is both complicit in this criminality, including hiding the evidence before a police search, and generous (well, sort of) by giving a bit of the fake money to beggars. A well-paced and unusual glorification of illegal activity for a 1907 film.

Alison McMahan lists this one in her filmography for Alice Guy, but most other sources claim Louis Feuillade as director--a rather frequent confusion given the lack of credits back then. Just based on the criminal subject matter, I would think it more likely it was made by Feuillade, although its family-oriented placement in the domestic sphere is suggestive of Guy's oeuvre, and I suppose it wouldn't be unheard of for two filmmakers working at the same studio to collaborate.