Le roi du maquillage

They didn't call Georges Méliès "the Magician" for nothing – though I am more partial to the great filmmaker's plot-driven masterpieces, he was also hugely popular for fascinating, special effects-driven snippets like this. Basically the cinematic equivalent of a magician's stage act, 'The Untamable Whiskers' gives Méliès an opportunity to show off the cross-fade effect, which allows him to fade discreetly between similar images.

A "man with whiskers" (played by the director himself) waltzes up to a blackboard and quickly sketches the image of a man with long hair. Shifting the board to the side, the man presents himself to the camera, stands still for a few moments and – voila! – he magically grows long hair. Méliès does this several times, experimenting with different hair styles, beard lengths and costumes. Best of all, he appears to be having a fun time doing it! Though the act (and the primitive special effect) is hardly interesting to modern audiences, the film has an odd charm about it, possibly aided by the director's apparently unyielding enthusiasm. Like any good stage magician, Méliès knows he's being clever, and I'm sure audiences back in 1904 were conversing amongst themselves about how on Earth he managed to pull it off!

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.

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.

This simple but clever Georges Méliès short feature is fairly amusing, and the technique is, as always with Méliès, as good as you could have found at the time. The visual effects are generally pretty smooth, and on some occasions they are nearly seamless as one image dissolves into another.

There isn't really a story, just a simple series of visual effects, with Méliès himself using a chalkboard and a handful of other props to present a series of gags involving the "Untamable Whiskers". While most of the gags are not all that much in themselves, one or two are relatively creative. Most of the creativity in this feature, though, is found in just making the camera tricks work.

Even the less smooth among Méliès's camera effects are usually at least as good as the dreary, often clumsy, computer-generated imagery that mars so many present-day pictures. The simplest of the early Méliès features, such as this one, look at least as good, and they could very well still have an audience long after all but the best of the computerized features of today have been forgotten.