The chief police officer, returning to the scene to write a report of the event, is just in time to see them escape, and chases them to an open area where a gas balloon is about to be launched.
[3] Méliès, who had previously worked with De Cottens on a 1904 Folies Bergère attraction later released as An Adventurous Automobile Trip, was commissioned for Les Quatre Cents Coups du diable to make two short films to be projected as part of the show: Le Voyage dans l'éspace (The Space Trip) and Le Cyclone (The Cyclone).
[4] Méliès reused Le Voyage dans l'éspace by incorporating it into The Merry Frolics of Satan, a film freely adapted from the Châtelet production.
[6] Robert Macaire, a legendary bandit antihero in the Romantic tradition, first appeared on stage as a character in a Parisian melodrama, The Inn of Les Adrets (L'Auberge des Audrets).
Other nineteenth-century actors who played Lemaître's version of Macaire included James William Wallack, Charles Fechter, and Sir Henry Irving.
[7] By the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Macaire and his sidekick, a fellow confidence trickster named Bertrand, had become among the most immediately recognizable icons of French caricature.
Méliès himself used them for caricature in 1889, when he criticized the Boulangist movement by depicting Georges Ernest Boulanger and Henri Rochefort as Robert Macaire and Bertrand, respectively.
[9] The film, by shifting the title characters' profession from confidence tricksters to bank robbers, avoids the political undertones that would otherwise have been connected with the figures of Robert Macaire and Bertrand, turning their exploits into the impetus for a comic chase sequence.
[12] A 2010 Slant Magazine review of a collection of Méliès films highlighted Robert Macaire and Bertrand for special praise, saying that during the criminals' flight through the sky, "Méliès manages to communicate something of the sublimity of motion, the expression of which forms one of the great pleasures of his later work and one which mirrors the director's own giddy sense of discovery in his own ability to manipulate space and time.