Le roi du maquillage

The premise is simple; the execution is not. Melies draws faces on a chalkboard. After each drawing, he stands front and center and become the picture. Eventually, our old friend the devil takes his turn after being drawn. The neat thing in this is the ability to match up these chalk drawings with the figures Melies creates. Very good.

Georges Melies once again takes centre-stage as he plays a quick-sketch artist who possesses the ability to transform himself into whatever character he draws on his blackboard. Of course the transformation is performed by movie trickery, and for its time it is quite impressive, even though 105 years on it is easy to see the joins. Some of the characters Melies turns himself into are quite grotesque; one of them is a scary clown reminiscent of the villain in Stephen King's It, another a devil with horns and a cape. This is a simple movie lasting little more than two minutes, but it's hugely entertaining and gives the versatile Melies an opportunity to show off his artistic skills.

Untamable Whiskers (1904)

*** (out of 4)

aka Le Roi du maquillage

Once again Melies plays a magician who draws up various faces on a chalk board only to then turn himself into those images. The transformations scenes are all rather obvious but I must admit that these still hold up better than a majority of these same type of scenes from various "B" movies. There's really nothing too overly funny here but the film still has all sorts of magical qualities to it. This is one of the director's better known films and rightfully so.

Like many of the films of Georges Méliès, the director himself is the star of this little silent film. He is an artist who draws pictures on a chalk board. Then, moments later, he magically is transformed into the image on the board! It's all cute fun and shows Méliès roots as a stage magician. While the film isn't as outrageous, complex or original as his more famous works (such as Le Voyage Dans le Lune), it is still head and shoulders above other films of the time. In general, his competitors (such as Lumiere and Edison) were filming very mundane scenes from real life (sort of like short and boring home movies). Georges Méliès storytelling and creativity make this film transcendent of the age and well worth seeing even today.

If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

I watched this as one of the shorts on The magic of Melies video cassette released by Kino on Video, 1994. Image quality was good. Music was chipper and matched the lighthearted mood of the film. No color was added. Cropping did not appear to interfere with the film, although it is hard to tell without titles. This should give an idea of the technical quality of the release I watched.

This film was mainly done to show off a particular special effect. A magician draws pictures on a chalkboard, and then his facial hair grows to fit the image he has drawn. This is part magic act, part comic routine. It is amusing, but special effects are so common today that it is not amazing, as it must have been to the people who first viewed it. Basically an image of the magician with one type of hair fades into an image of the same magician in the same position with another type of hair. The quality of this special effect is fairly good, so it didn't seem cheap, just redundant.

My recommendation is to watch it if you are interested in very early film history. It is a good example of a setup that is similar to a booth or simple theater show, but depicts something that could never be shown live. This film predates plots being the norm in movies, and itself has no plot.