id: Unidentified Film No. 164
director: Unknown
year: 1913
country: France
alternative titles: Alma auf Abwegen

Main title: Alma auf Abwegen (Alma goes astray) [Company logo:] Schwan-Biograph g ges [GmbH?, Gera?] [frame scan 1]

Intertitles: Ein Ehemann, der nichts merkt ... (A husband, who doesn't notice anything …) / Alma schützt vor Kopfschmerzen zu haben. (Alma feigns a headache) / Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt... (Only he who knows what yearning is...) / … weiß was ich leide! ( … understands what I suffer!) / In Bodos Heim. (At Bodo's home) / Alma willigt in ein Stelldichein ein. (Alma agrees to a tryst) / Ihr Traum... (Her dream...) / Das Gewissen ruft. (Conscience calling) / Alma verzichtet geläutert. (Alma abstains, purified)

Interior. Two men and a woman playing cards. The wife flirts with the younger man behind her husband's back [frame scan 2]. He charms Alma and gives her a letter, which she sticks in her cleavage. She sends her husband out of the bedroom, reads the letter and is overjoyed! [frame scan 3] She telephones the man (split screen) [frame scan 4] and arranges a rendezvous. Alma in her bedroom, hangs up the telephone and kisses it. She goes to sleep. An angel appears [frame scan 5] and makes her experience a nightmare: On her way to commit adultery with her lover, she is confronted by various men, who via stop motion all transform into her husband [frame scan 6-8]; finally even her lover transforms into her husband! Panicking, she jumps out the window and slides along a line into her bedroom [frame scan 9]. There, she wakes from her nightmare - and cancels the tryst by telephone (again seen in split screen). Her husband comes into the room and she embraces him, smiling [frame scan 10].

Production Company: Comica, Nice (a division of Pathé Frères, Paris)
Length: 157m
Format: 35mm, 1.19:1 (originally 1.33:1)
Picture/Sound: b/w, silent with synchronised soundtrack
Notes: 'Zeiss Ikon' edgecode; Variable area optical soundtrack

Source notes
Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen

This short can be "Leontine s'envole", 1911, prod. Comica, Catalogue des films francais de fiction de 1908 à 1918.

or Zoé et le parapluie miraculeux (Comica, 1913), Catalogue des films francais de fiction de 1908 à 1918.
stilsl 17/18.

Film contains retrospectively added music and commentary. / The company logo present in the main title and intertitles is at best difficult to read. / Title cannot be found in any filmography. The Siegen Cinema Databases reveal some other titles with "Alma" in them, all of which are dated to 1913, with the production company given as "Comica" and country as "France". Alma's French name, according to the database, is "Zoé". In all likelihood, the film in question here is another film from this series. - When exactly the sound version was produced cannot be determined (presumably at the end of the 30's as part of a series of early films that were reissued in sound versions by Althoff, among others) This form of "recycling", however, was still taking place in the 50s.