Ohé! Ohé! (1930s Short) Review - A Dusty, Hissy Little Time Capsule

If you're hunting for a lost masterpiece of French cinema, keep walking. Ohé! Ohé! is really only for the absolute nerds who want to see what early 1930s talkies looked like when they had zero budget. Anyone expecting slick pacing or actual jokes that land today will probably turn this off after four minutes. 😴

I stumbled on this while looking for old shorts, and man, the audio is a trip. It has this *constant* heavy hiss in the background, like someone is frying onions right next to the microphone.

The plot is basically nonexistent, just a bunch of guys running around and shouting. Jean Mercanton is here, looking incredibly young and slightly confused about where he's supposed to stand.

He has this face that makes him look like he just realized he left his oven on back home. It's kind of endearing, actually.

The Eyebrow Acting

But the real star of the show—or at least the guy trying the hardest—is René Koval. His eyebrows deserve their own credit in the cast list.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Ohé! Ohé! (1931) through its definitive frames.

He does this thing where he looks at the camera and just wiggles them to show he's being funny. It's the kind of stage acting that didn't quite translate to the screen yet, but I love it anyway.

It reminds me a bit of the chaotic, slightly desperate energy in Dodge Your Debts, where everyone is just trying so hard to fill the silence. Early sound films really didn't know what to do when people weren't talking.

So they just had actors walk back and forth across these tiny, flat sets. The background looks like it was painted about ten minutes before they started rolling.

A few random things I noticed:

• There is a door that doesn't quite close right in the background, and you can see a shadow of a crew member for a split second.
• The music just randomly stops and starts. No fade out, just clack, silence.
• Robert Tourneur wears a hat that looks two sizes too small for his head.

Is it good? Not really.

But there's this weird charm to how clunky it all is. It feels like watching a high school play where everyone forgot their lines but they're pretending everything is totally fine.

If you're into dusty archives, give it a look. Otherwise, don't bother wasting the twenty minutes.