Quicker'n a Wink

Nice little vintage short that comes with one of the Marx Brothers boxes, and shows a series of experiments using stroboscopic photography (the technique that "puts the super in super speed photography"). It was probably cooler in 1940 than in 2013 – you can really tell how impressed the narrator, who is quite dry despite the increasingly desperate attempts at cracking jokes, assumes the audience to be – but even now it's pretty fun to watch things like a woman bursting a bubble with a needle in slow motion.

There's a lot of milk in this for some reason; there's a cat lapping milk, there's milk dripping on a plate, and there's a scene where they drop a cup of milk onto the floor. All in all it's the best I've seen from Sidney and clocking in somewhere around 10 minutes it never gets boring but still, it's probably primarily good for one viewing as the novelty wears off quite fast and there is only so much lactose a person can take.

Quicker 'n a Wink (1940)

*** (out of 4)

Oscar-winning Pete Smith short introduces us to Dr. Harold E. Edgerton who helped develop stroboscopic photography, which gives us the ability to use slow motion to see something that would otherwise be too fast to be seen. This is yet another winning short from director Sidney who made quite a few of them before turning to features. This movie is certainly one of the more entertaining ones from Smith who adds his typical fun narration. We see various objects including a hummingbird, a lightbulb being shot, a bubble being popped, a cat drinking milk and others. All of these are rather entertaining like how a cat actually drinks and many of them, like the bubble, are very funny. Another nice sequence was a kicker kicking a football.

Harold E. Edgarton invented a stroboscopic camera that allows us to see such things as the moment of impact when a football is kicked, a bullet as it shatters an electric light, a cat lapping milk with its tongue forked downward and curled below to scoop up the milk, a dentist drilling a tooth as bits of enamel fly around, and a man driving a golf ball through a telephone book.

This Pete Smith Specialty is one of their more serious attempts to enlighten us on how things really happen but escape detection from the human eye.

What I missed was seeing Dave O'Brien doing his physical pratfalls and assorted acrobatics, so this was of minor interest to me.

I do like Pete Smith's narration style, and here it's at its borderline sarcastic best as he tries to explain the scientific theories behind the new slo motion stroboscope or "flicker box" which uses light that flashes up to 2000 times per second to help capture the perfect focus when manipulating the speed of action photography. We see that to good effect as a phone book gets targeted by a golf ball, a cat laps up it's milk and we even see the precision with which a pencil penetrates the wafer thin side of a bubble before the astonishing imagery of a bullet being tracked from a gun barrel to shatter a glass light bulb. Imperceptible to the naked eye, but clear as "a Californian morning" for us here. The gist is maybe laboured a little as once we've got the point as the imagery repeats itself a little too much with milk and humming birds, and the denouement in the dentist's chair takes slow motion (and accompanying audio) just a tad too far for those of us with a sensitive disposition! If science were taught at school with this degree of amiable light-heartedness then maybe we'd remember more about it! Good fun.

A Smith called Pete talks a lot while we look at high-speed motion pictures. In cooperation with scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we get to look at a bunch of things we rarely get to see: a pencil popping a balloon, a hummingbird's wings as it flies, a bullet fired at a light bulb... and see that things happening at such speeds are not as we usually imagine them.

These specialized cameras, Pete informs the audience, can record images at up to 1,500 times the normal speed. It was impressive enough to win an Oscar. As this sort of effect has become much more accessible, the novelty of this short has diminished, even though it's still a lot of fun.