Month: April 2021

Cinderella (1911)

Cinderella (1911)
Article 5663 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-11-2019
Directed by George Nichols
Featuring Florence La Badie, Harry Benham, Anna Rosemond
Country: USA
What it is: Fairy tale

Thanks to her fairy godmother, Cinderella gets a chance to go the ball and dance with the prince. What will happen?

If you’re going to do a comprehensive review of fantastic cinema, you’re going to encounter a lot of fairy tale adaptations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the story of Cinderella proved to be the most common of these. I’ve seen so many versions that after a while, I grow to appreciate any new detail that adds a bit of novelty to the story. This short take on the tale has a few. To begin with, Cinderella’s father actually appears as a character; in most versions, he either never appears or is assumed to be dead. Granted, the most he’s really given to do is to have a scroll grabbed from him by the dominating stepmother, but at least he’s present. Another novelty is that the coach, horses and footmen and magically created indoors rather than outside, which forces the fairy godmother to create a magic exit for the coach to go through. Last is that the fairy godmother makes a final appearance at the climax of the story. These may be small details, but with a story that is so familiar, I found them to be welcome distractions, though taken as a whole, this is just another version of a familiar tale.

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Max fait du ski (1910)

Max fait du ski (1910)
Article 5662 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-9-2019
Directed by Louis J. Gasnier and Lucien Nonguet
Featuring Max Linder and Gabrielle Lange
Country: France
What it is: Slapstick

Max goes skiing and proves not to be particularly competent at the task.

IMDB classifies this slapstick short as a fantasy. Perhaps it is; the print I saw feels like a fragment, so there is a chance that something fantastic happens in the missing footage. As to what it could be, I have no idea; the plot description on IMDB gives no hint on what it could be. So let’s classify this one as a false alarm and this review as more of a warning for those expecting something more. On its own terms, it’s not bad; Max Linder was a talented physical comedian, and his antics are on the fun side. Still, it’s pretty obvious and hardly essential.

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The Mermaid (1910)

The Mermaid (1910)
aka Rusalka
Article 5661 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-1-2019
Directed by Vasili Goncharov
Featuring Vasili Stepanov, Aleksandra Goncharova, Andrej Gromov
Country: Russia
What it is: Opera adaptation

A prince jilts a miller’s daughter, who attempts suicide. He is haunted by her image at his wedding. He decides to go back and discover her fate…

Like Feuillade’s THE FAIRY OF THE SURF, this is another early drama in which the story involves romance and ends in an underwater kingdom. Unlike that film, though, the romances in this one all go sour, and the mood is gloomier. In terms of plot this one is more obscure; I’m not sure if the miller’s daughter has truly committed suicide or has survived, or whether the vision during the wedding is a ghost or just the prince’s imagination. However, I may attribute the confusion here to the fact that it’s an adaptation of an opera which most assuredly ran longer than ten minutes; obviously, much plot detail has been obscured. Nevertheless, this one is not as satisfying as the Feuillade film. And for those wondering about the title, there do appear a group of mermaids, albeit ones without fish tails.

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Spring (1909)

Spring (1909)
aka Le printemps
Article 5660 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-29-2019
Directed by Louis Feuillade
Featuring Henri Duval, Christiane Mandalys, Maurice Vinot
Country: France
What it is: Decorative short

Spring is celebrated with mystical characters appearing in vistas of nature.

IMDB splits this short into four different movies, with each movie consisting of one or two of the seven episodes that make up the combined version I saw. I decided to review them as a single entity, taking note that only the first of the four movies is classified as a fantasy by IMDB. Still, any one of the four sections would qualify; each section features characters magically appearing in a spring setting, and relaxing / dancing / cavorting / playing in the setting. As such, there’s no plot; it’s a decorative mood piece that’s pretty to look at. Oddly enough, this is the second movie in a row to feature fairies dancing on water.

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Une excursion incoherente (1909)

Une excursion incoherente (1909)
Article 5658 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-27-2019
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Pretty strange

Some people go on a disastrous picnic followed by a visit to a haunted mansion.

This short by Chomon is a very good example of how he had his own vision beyond what he borrowed from Melies. There are four major setpieces in this short – the picnic, the scene at the fireplace, the scene in the bedroom, and the scene outside the mansion. The fireplace scene and the scene outside the mansion are very reminiscent of Melies, but the other two scenes are something else. The grotesque picnic sequence is as surreal as something you’d expect from Luis Bunuel, and there is apparently some speculation as to whether he was influenced by this short. The scene in the bedroom makes some very interesting use of shadow imagery and animation, with the latter element showing a possible influence by Emile Cohl. There’s no real plot to the short; it’s a series of bizarre setpieces, and as is implied by the title, it is incoherent. Nevertheless, it still makes for an interesting viewing experience, and certainly feels different from other shorts of the same era.

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Le papillon fantastique (1909)

Le papillon fantastique (1909)
Article 5657 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-26-2019
Directed Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Magic short fragment

A magician performs magic involving a giant butterfly and a spider creature.

Apparently, all that is left of this short is a two-minute fragment, but given that it’s a magic trick short, I’m guessing all I’m missing is a few tricks. The best thing about this is its switch of mood halfway through; the sequence with the butterfly is all bright and cheery, but things turn dark and ominous when the spider shows up. Outside of that, it looks like your typical Melies magic trick short – entertaining, but hardly essential.

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Le Miroir Magique (1908)

Le Miroir Magique (1908)
Article 5656 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-25-2019
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Featuring Julienne Mathieu
Country: France
What it is: Decorative short

A woman sees visions of other women in her mirror and her jewelry.

There’s a certain type of silent short that I’ve decided to call “decorative” shorts. They’re usually very short, have no real plot, and seem to be focused on pretty visual tableaus above anything else. This is an example; it mostly consists of a woman sitting by her makeup bureau and seeing visions of dancing women in her mirror, and then her jewelry. It’s pretty enough to look at (which I suspect is its main goal), and it’s too short to really get dull, so it could be said that it succeeds. Still, it’s rather difficult to assess shorts like this beyond these points.

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Fireside Reminiscences (1908)

Fireside Reminiscences (1908)
Article 5655 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-21-2019
Directed by J. Searle Dawley and Edwin S. Porter
Featuring Miss Abbot, Miss Acton, Edward Boulden
Country: USA
What it is: Marital melodrama

A husband throws out his wife when he sees her embracing another man, unaware that the man she’s embracing is her brother. Three years later, the husband reminisces about his wife at the fireside.

This was apparently based on a popular song of the day. Originally, it looked like the fantastic content would consist of nothing more than of having seen visions of things in a fireplace (which would make it pretty marginal), but one of the visions does not appear to be a reminiscence, but a mystical revelation showing the husband where his wife is now, a circumstance which leads to a happy ending. Evaluating this one is tough, as the print is very badly damaged, and some of the scenes are in poor condition. Overall, though, the story is a little hard to swallow and is fairly slow-moving on occasion. It’s so-so, but nothing essential.

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Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris (1999)

Gamera 3: The Revenge of Iris (1999)
aka Gamera 3: Jashin kakusei
Article 5654 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-21-2019
Directed by Shusuke Kaneko
Featuring Shinobu Nakayama, Ai Maeda, Yukijiro Hotaru
Country: Japan
What it is: Gamera movie

A young woman with a hatred for Gamera (most of her family died when a building collapsed during his appearance) befriends a newly hatched monster who she sees as the instrument of her revenge.

The best Gamera movie? Granted, there’s not a whole lot of real competition out there; only this movie’s immediate two predecessors are in the same league. Yet, even they pale a little in comparison to this one; whereas the previous two movies remained fairly conventional kaijus in spirit (albeit very well made ones), this one takes things in a different direction by really working the human characters into the mix. There’s not quite as much monster action in this one, but that’s because the movie is working the characters and the plot. Even the finale is something different; by restricting most of the final battle to the interior of a building, it gives a more intimate feeling to the movie, which is certainly unusual for a kaiju. It also addresses some issues that other kaijus ignore; even with Gamera being the “good guy”, he’s so huge that collateral damage of all sorts (both to buildings and people) is inevitable, and he’s seen as a threat anyway. So, yes, I would say this is easily the best Gamera movie, and it puts most of the Godzilla movies to shame as well.

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L’insaisissable pickpocket (1908)

L’insaisissable pickpocket (1908)
Article 5653 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-19-2019
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Comic special effects short

Cops chase a pickpocket who also manages to be a snazzy dresser as well as an accomplished magician.

The plot is simple as pie; it’s a series of gags in which police are constantly thwarted by the pickpocket’s magic transformations. Though the special effects are good, it’s the breezy and confident humor that really sells this; the pickpocket is played with such cocky confidence that he becomes a fun character. A lot happens in the short’s four-minute running time, but, except for a few moments where it looks like a bit of footage is missing, it’s easy to follow. My favorite moment has the police thinking they’ve got the pickpocket trapped in a barrel.

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