NO MORE BALD MEN (1908)
aka No More Bald Heads
Article 5351 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-21-2017
Director unknown
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Comic special effects short

A bald man is delighted when he is given a hair-growing potion that works. However, he isn’t very careful in his use of it…

Here’s another title that languished on my “ones that got away” only to be finally resurrected on YouTube under a slightly different title. It’s a pretty delightful short; it finds just the right comic tone, and it handles the special effects of hair suddenly appearing on a man’s head with skill. However, the person who directed my attention to the availability of this short brought up some interesting questions as to the actual date of this short. Apparently, Pathe Freres on occasion was given to shooting remakes of earlier shorts whose prints had deteriorated and replacing those prints with those of the remakes. My source claims this may actually be a 1912 remake of a 1904 film; notice that neither of these dates is 1908, the date on IMDB. I tend to agree with this evaluation, mainly because I’ve now had a chance to see many films from this era, and one thing I noticed is that it movie acting evolved during this time. The acting in this short seems much more assured in its style than what I’d expect from 1904 or 1908; it does seem to fit in well with 1912, though.