Le cake-walk infernal

There are recurring characters in the Melies canon, and the devil is one of them. Apparently, there is a fixation on what hell would be like and what the devil would look like. I thought the dancing was really fantastic. George's Melies was obviously a multi-talented performer. He was a magician, an actor, director, creator and scene stylist. His closing dance was incredibly addictive. No plot, but has that ever mattered with him?

It seems incredible to me that a filmmaker who was so far ahead of his peers in 1903 could fall so far behind them within the space of a decade. By 1912 or so Melies' career as a film-maker was over and he ended up selling sweets from a street kiosk for a living. And yet this film is so energetic and inventive, it leaves you wishing he hadn't found it so difficult to adapt as the movies evolved.

There's no story to this one as such, just a group of people dancing in various styles against a typically fantastic Melies background which is presumably presumed to be a vision of hell - although the set could easily have been used in Voyage to the Moon. I watched this on YouTube, and the soundtrack was played by a jazz quintet. It's remarkable how well the music suited the visuals and the soundtrack complements the astonishingly lively and kinetic capers on the screen. Definitely worth watching.

The summary was NOT meant to be negative--it is a true description of what seems to be happening in this pleasant but not especially remarkable film by that genius of silent cinema, Georges Méliès.

The film was made on a set with sliding backdrops. They are painted up to look like a cave--I assume this is meant to be Hell inside the Earth. And into this cave appear a wide variety of ladies dancing can-can style as well as the Devil himself. It all seems very random--with various characters appearing and disappearing without much story line or reason. Because there is no apparent theme, it all looks like a talent show, of sorts, and is among the poorer films I've seen by Méliès.

Having said this, poor Méliès is still great film work when compared to his contemporaries--even those who were deliberately copying his style and camera tricks. The randomness and ordinariness don't mean this isn't entertaining--but it sure could have used a theme to give it a sense of purpose other than to say "life here in Hell is pretty cool--come join the party"!

Although the original motivation behind this Georges Méliès feature was to spoof a popular dance craze of the day, it has so much of Méliès's wit and camera wizardry that it is still quite funny and entertaining today. This kind of popular culture parody is just one of the many genres to which Méliès applied his extraordinary imagination.

The feature takes the "Cake-Walk" dance and uses it is the subject for a series of short dance numbers, some of which would almost look at home in an MGM musical, and others of which are enjoyably bizarre. The backgrounds are stage-like, but they usually contain plenty of interesting detail in themselves. Some of the sequences feature amusing sights without any camera tricks, while at other times Méliès demonstrates the special effects for which he was so well-known.

There isn't really a story so much as a succession of images, which yet somehow seem connected by a strange logic all their own. There are so many unusual and skillful Méliès movies that it gets awkward to say of all of them that, "any fan of Méliès would enjoy this", but in this case it is once again true.

Melies made hundreds upon hundreds of short films; some of them masterpiece,s others mediocre, many falling somewhere in between. It can be proposed that "The Cake-Walk Infernal" is among his better known works (that is casting aside legendary films like "A Trip to the Moon", "The Voyage Across the Impossible ", or even "The Merry Frolics of Satan"), mainly because of Martin Scorsese's recommendation of it for aspiring filmmakers/film students. This film is just simple, classic Melies with an extra dose of weird. It mostly consists of a parodic version of a dance that seems to have been popular at the time of the film's release; it takes place in Hell, despite the merry mood, and Melies himself plays a reasonably athletic Satan. The visual effects here are quite phenomenal, particularly for 1903 (!), and the sets, while sort of cheesy, are charming and appealing to the eye. There are also plenty of laughs to be had, mainly because of Melies' comic and over the top performance and the trick photography that soon ensues. Those that are rather familiar with Melies and his style will likely be able to appreciate this for what it is: another unique and wild entry in the vast Melies cannon.