Children's Reformatory (French: Le bagne des gosses) is a 1907 French silent short film directed by Charles Decroix, inspired by the eponymous novel by Aristide Bruant.

[1] A young orphan is thrown out into the street by a ruthless janitor after the death of his mother.

He wanders pitifully through the streets, soliciting in vain the charity of the passers-by.

Caught in the act of vagrancy and theft, he is sent to a penitentiary where he leads the hard life of convicts.

He manages to escape and hides in a doghouse where he eats the dog's food but is soon recaptured.

[2] This film was produced by the SCAGL (Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres [fr] [Cinematographic Society of Authors and Writers]), a company created in order to widen the audience of the cinema towards more cultivated and more affluent layers of the population, with the film adaptation of classics of popular literature.

This is the case with this film loosely based on the eponymous novel by Aristide Bruant.

Charles Pathé was a shareholder and director of the SCAGL, for which he built new state-of-the-art studios on land adjacent to his factory in Vincennes.

The film was distributed by Pathé Frères in the 8th series of its Scènes dramatiques et réalistes [Dramatic and realistic scenes], which often related the adventures of poor children, sometimes with a happy end.

The film was released on 26 July 1907 in Lyon (France),[2] and on 31 August 1907 in the United States.

[4] The film is composed of nine multishot scenes introduced by intertitles, including a total of 30 shots.

Most of the shotsweare filmed on location in a forest and at military premises, and four were shot on studio sets.

1. view of a poor bedroom with the mother dying in her bed attended by her son.

A clearing in a forest; the boy seats down to eat his bread while a man walks by.

A lane in a forest; the baker comes running in, meets the man seen in 6 who points to where he saw the boy.

The two gendarmes and the boy enter left, a sentry open the gate and they go inside.

A couple of guards escort a gang of children in convict attire.

A group of convict children are digging the earth under the custody of guards.

The orphan whispers something in the ear of one of the children and rapidly exits left.

The chase continues over a trench in the forest, along some fortifications and in the street of a village.

A well-dressed gentleman gives his card to the guards and convince them to leave the boy with him.

Full shot sideways of the boy is standing in front of the gate of a house in an elegant suit.

The film concludes with the Pathé logo of a rooster with the initials SCAGL.

"[1] Alison Griffiths notes that the film shows that "the Auburn system of congregant labor by day and isolation in the single cell by night [was] in effect in the French "maison de correction"" and controversially considers that there is "an obvious comic element to seeing eight- to fourteen-year-old boys, as opposed to adult men, dressed in prison stripes performing hard labor."

She also remarks that "the image of children being subjected to punishments that hardly match their crime raises the question of the potential bad taste of such a film.

"[5] In this respect, Richard Abel discusses the censorship problems met by the film in the US.