An Interesting Story

This is the kind of film Chaplin might have made had he been making movies in 1905, its' humour and inventiveness are that impressive. But then it's a film made by James Williamson - one of the Brighton School of early British filmmakers - and by 1905 he had already demonstrated that he was a man capable of producing quality material.

The story is slight but fast-moving and humorous. Our hero is so absorbed in the book he is reading that he can't bear to raise his head from it which means he is fortunate to somehow survive a number of potentially fatal encounters with scrubbing housewives, skipping children and slow-moving steamrollers.

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

Here we have a man reading a gripping book at the breakfast table. Totally engrossed in his book he puts milk in his hat among other things. Leaving the house he continues to read and finds he comes to more mischief. As with their other films, this company produces a film that is imaginative, amusing and technically quite impressive. The joke is simple but very effective and is used well to set up a collection of pratfalls and accidents that range from the ordinary to the "flat out" extraordinary. It is funny for the most part and I did like the way that the effects are used as part of the joke.

Overall then an amusing and well delivered film that is as interested in the importance of timing as it is in the effects and other technical aspects of the delivery.

Here's an odd little thing - A Peculiar Story might have fit it better than the 'Interesting' word of the title (surely there are better/more creative words for what this film turns into), where we follow a man as he pours coffee into his hat, stumbles over girls playing jump-rope, can't stop reading his book and then, not unlike Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, gets run over by a steamroller. But that's not the end of what seems like a rather dark turn in the story.

This is a clever little movie, even as it seems to exist simply to showcase this man having pratfalls. And yet there's a musical quality to it, a rhythm that makes it work as cinema, and the actor is also endearing as an on-screen presence. He works because he knows just when to pour the coffee into the wrong place and when to follow it up with. He's not the Tramp, but it should be clear to almost no one that he must have seen this; if nothing else it fits as being true vaudeville (except for the climax and conclusion, which leaps off into fantasy land).

It's... cute, and weird.

A gentleman is so engrossed in his book that he serves tea in his hat, walks into people, animals and things, and eventually is crushed by a steamroller, the lumbering approach of which he is oblivious. Fortunately, a couple of cyclists witness the flattening and with aid of their trusty tyre pumps reinflate the hapless reader, whose main concern is finding his book and his hat. Whoever was in charge of continuity goofed - the victim's hat was moved during the substitution splice that returned him to 3D corporality, revealing the 'trick'. Silly but funny and likely the inspiration for decades of comic steamroller shtick.

... as most early films were very short in length by necessity and were slices of life. Anything that was not a slice of life was usually a historical reenactment.

This is an attempt at early slapstick. It's about a man who is so engrossed in what he is reading that he pours milk into his bowler hat rather than a cereal bowl, on his way to work trips over a servant cleaning the walkway, and then, with nose still in book, almost meets a tragic end in the streets if not for the presence of two men and a bicycle pump.

Filmed in the UK, this story is still relevant today if you simply exchange the book with a cell phone. James Williamson is the director, and he originally processed film for other early filmmakers until he began making films of his own. The actors are unidentified, although the main actor's style is reminiscent of Chaplin's.