IL MONELLO DELLA STRADA (1950)
aka Street Urchin
Article 5284 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-28-2016
Directed by Carlo Borghesio
Featuring Erminio Macario, Ciccio Jacono, Luisa Rossi
Country: Italy
What it is: Italian comedy

An Italian working as a miner in Argentina marries a woman by proxy. When he returns to Italy, he discovers the woman he married is dead and that he has become the legal father of the woman’s son. He tries to get rid of the boy, but there’s a mysterious woman who won’t let him do it…

To some extent, I must withhold judgment on this one because the copy I found was in Italian without English subtitles. All I initially had to go on was the fantastic content as listed in the Walt Lee guide, which mentions that the plot involves a mother’s ghost making sure that her son finds a good father. Fortunately, this tidbit of information did make it possible for me to more or less follow the plot, and the fact that it was a comedy which occasionally relies on visuals for its humor means that I wasn’t left completely out of the loop. In short, despite the language barrier and the fact that certain plot points and jokes escaped me, I did rather enjoy this one. There’s a fun sequence in which the main character pretends to be a western hero character in a comic book, and the final sequence of the movie has our hero moving through an entire world frozen in time, and the fact that it’s all done by having people trying (not always successfully) to stand really still doesn’t really interfere with the fun of the moment. I always find it a nice experience when I can somehow appreciate a foreign movie when I can’t understand the language, and it happens often enough that I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time by making the effort.

THE MYSTERIOUS PORTRAIT (1899)
aka Le portrait mysterieux
Article 5277 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-20-2016
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Early trick short

A magician sets up a portrait and then magically makes himself appear in it. He then has a conversation with his portrait of himself.

Here’s another early short from Melies’s formative years; according to some user comments on IMDB, this short involved his first use of a matte shot, so it can be grouped with those in which he was trying out and using new techniques. It’s a simple trick short with some odd touches, such as the fact that he changes the background of his setting during the length of the short. It’s only a minute long, but it’s charming and fun during its length.

MUSICA-LULU (1947)
Article 5276 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-19-2016
Directed by Izzy Sparber
Featuring the voices of Arnold Stang, Cecil Roy, Jackson Beck
Country: USA
What it is: Little Lulu cartoon

Lulu sneaks out of her violin practice to play baseball. When she gets beaned by a baseball, she has a nightmare…

This cartoon from Famous Studios has a lot in common with yesterday’s cartoon; it’s from the same company, has the same director, and also has a musical theme to it. No, this one has no anthropomorphic animals; it has anthropomorphic musical instruments that put Lulu on trial for abandoning her violin, so we get talking oboes, drums, cellos, and even a talking lyre who testifies against her. The dream sequence is a lot of fun and gets positively surreal, which makes it reminiscent of some of the early Fleischer talkies. Several cartoons were made with Little Lulu, and I rather like them, but they weren’t up to the level of the comics. Still, I found this one quite amusing.

MUCH ADO ABOUT MUTTON (1947)
Article 5275 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-18-2016
Directed by Izzy Sparber
Featuring the voices of Sid Raymond and Arnold Stang
Country: USA
What it is: Blackie the Lamb cartoon

A ravenous wolf poses as a jazzman in order to lure Blackie’s nephews into a trap. Will Blackie be able to defeat his nemesis?

As far as the fantastic content goes, we’re in the usual cartoon territory with anthropomorphic animals and exaggerated gags, but that’s about it for genre content. Personally, I felt the quality of the cartoons produced by Paramount took a drop in quality after the Fleischer’s left, but they remained watchable. This one does manage to be energetic and it does have a few creative gags to its credit, my favorite involving eardrums. Blackie the Lamb was one of their regular characters, though I don’t know just how many cartoons were made involving the character. This one is okay; it’s not great, but has its moments.

MORPHEUS MIKE (1915)
Article 5274 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-17-2016
Directed by Willis H. O’Brien
No cast
Country: USA
What it is: Early stop-motion animation

A hobo saves a woman’s laundry from a goat, and is rewarded by a meal which is unfortunately stolen by an animal. Then the hobo dreams he is ordering from a menu in caveman times.

One of the things I love about the original KING KONG is that the title creation had so much character, and I find that useful to remember when exploring O’Brien’s very early stop-motion animation shorts. In the short time we spend with this one (it runs only three minutes), we do get hints of character from both Mike and the housewife; no, you can’t call either of them fully developed, but there are touches that add dimension to them. That may compensate somewhat for the fact that as a story, there’s not much here. It would have been fun to see the caveman sequence expanded to a much longer short; here, it feels like an abrupt change of scenery from the rest of the short. I think it’s most useful to see this short as another step in O’Brien honing his craft.

MONSIEUR CLOWN CHEZ LES LILLIPUTIENS (1909)
Article 5273 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-16-2016
Directed by Emile Cohl
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Stop motion clown antics

A clown performs tricks and antics for an audience.

The title implies, of course, that the audience is made up of Lilliputians, the tiny people of “Gulliver’s Travels”, and I suppose this may provide the fantastic content. However, within the context of this short, the clown isn’t significantly larger than the audience, and there are no characters or incidents that clearly demonstrate that they’re not of normal size. Cohl experiments with more conventional stop-motion animation here, and I’m not sure he demonstrates a real proficiency at it; the animation looks ragged and a bit jerky. Furthermore, this style doesn’t allow him to engage in his stream-of-consciousness style at all; there are really no transformations on display here. If you reject the Lilliputian argument for fantastic content, the closest the short comes to having some is the passing appearance of a miniature horse. I have to admit that this is a somewhat disappointing item from Cohl’s oeuvre.

A MESMERIAN EXPERIMENT (1905)
aka Le baquet de Mesmer
Article 5258 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-30-2016
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Magic trick film

A magician shows us that he can create dancing girls from an empty tub.

Much as I love Melies, I’m going to have to call foul on the title here; if you’re going to reference Mesmer, than you should have something involving hypnotism in the works. There’s nothing like that here; he does a magic trick with a tub to make it produce a series of dresses, which then turn into dancing girls, which of course, then, dance. For a minute I thought he was going to pull one of the dancing girls down to do trick with hypnotism, but no, they just dance some more, and then they are turned into ducks. For Melies, this is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff, and personally, I’d rather see tumbling imps, but no such luck. This is not Melies at his best.

MARY JANE’S MISHAP (1903)
Article 5257 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-28-2016
Directed by George Albert Smith
Featuring Laura Bayley
Country: UK
What it is: Slapstick short

Mary Jane attempts to light her stove with paraffin. Carnage ensues.

To be perfectly honest, Mary Jane isn’t a paragon of wisdom; the opening sequence has her incompetently trying to polish a shoe and then liking her new look when the polish gets on her face. The incident with the paraffin pretty much takes her out of the gene pool. The comic exaggeration was what I would have chosen as the fantastic content here were it not for the fact that an unexpected coda to the action occurs at someone’s grave (you can guess whose), and we get the appearance of a ghost. This one is a bit on the goofy side, but it’s likable just the same.

MAKE MINE MUSIC (1946)
Article 5256 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-26-2016
Directed by Robert Cormack, Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Joshua Meador
Featuring the voices of Nelson Eddy, Diane Shore, The Andrews Sisters
Country: USA
What it is: Musical hodgepodge

A variety of jazzy animated segments is shown.

During the late forties, Disney was a bit short of talent and resources, and got by by releasing movies that were largely ideas for shorts strung together. The end result here is something of a popular-music version of FANTASIA, though certainly it’s less ambitious. It’s something of a mixed bag; some of the more abstract mood shorts get lost in the mix, and others fall flat. There are definite highlights here, the most obvious being the last story, about an opera-singing whale who dreams of singing at the Met; he ends up being hunted by a musicologist who is convinced the whale has swallowed an opera singer. Nelson Eddy sings all of the parts in this one, and it’s quite memorable; I remember seeing this one when I was a kid. Of the rest, I was also very fond of the Andrews Sister number about two hats that fall in love, and I also like “All the Cats Join In”, an infectious sequence in which teenagers go to a dance that has such energy that the artists can just barely keep ahead of the action; a pencil is still drawing the action as it happens. When originally released on VHS, the opening segment, a rustic ballad about feuding hillbillies was omitted due to the gun violence, though I didn’t find the violence too upsetting; however, it is one of the weakest segments of the film.

MOON MAN (1905)
aka Mister Moon
Article 5222 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-5-2016
Director unknown
Cast unknown
Country: UK
What it is: Charming trick short

The moon makes faces… and then proves to be a song and dance man.

As you can tell from the above plot description, there really isn’t a plot, but when you get into the world of early silents, you find that a lot. Basically, it’s a special effects short with the moon rising with a human face that performs profuse mugging, and then magically it spots a straw hat and a body, and sings and dances. It’s actually quite charming, at least partially because it’s not really like any other short that I’ve seen from this era; it’s really just a good-natured diversion, and on that level, it works very well.