Le palais des mille et une nuits

While this fairy tale adaptation by Georges Melies is visually arresting, the storyline is so impossible to follow as to render the film unintelligible, which serves to undermine all the effort Melies, his crew and cast have obviously put into the production. The film is painstakingly hand-coloured, but the print I saw on the internet was badly blurred which meant the colours bled into one another quite badly.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the film today is the set design - even though by modern standards it is a little too busy with a bit too much detail. Overall, the film is visually impressive, but it falls far short of Melies' best.

I actually have no problem at all with the slow tempo of this movie. But given all the black-and-white sections needed to complete a print of this film, you do have to use a little imagination to realize what this looked like when it was first released, and how early-cinema audiences must have reacted to it.

The purpose of a lot of Mèliés movies is using the medium of film to show off spectacle. And this film is truly visually spectacular. Even in the 21st century I find myself awed by the fantastic coloring on this film. If you've never seen any of it in the kaleidoscopic colors it was painted, you really need to get the Flicker Alley 5-dvd set of Mèliés films and see this. I was flabbergasted to see the minute detail of sumptuous coloring in the crowd scene at the beginning. One-by-one various incredibly-costumed performers march onto the stage until it is absolutely filled with characters, costumes and color. Unfortunately, only a black and white print today exists of the very first minute or two of this film, after which the color explodes. Some day someone will restore the black-and-white sections and the poor-color sections of this film well enough to justify re-coloring it so we can have a complete print looking the way Mèliés intended.

You will have to use your mind's eye, then, to imagine this movie in pristine form. The multiple fantastic characters (even though they don't do much), the sets and the costumes, the pyrotechnics, the treasures and the overall pageantry give much to look at, and I can easily see how this would have been an audience pleaser back in 1905.

The story mixes together all sorts of Middle Eastern and Eastern, and even European story conventions, into a very amusing hodgepodge (the main character, not Mèliés by the way, is even named "Prince Charming" instead of Aladdin). Mèliés' narration makes complete sense out of the action, so you really need to either read his text first, or see the movie with the narration in the soundtrack (see Flicker Alley).

I admit that this is not the very best Mèliés film (like the action-filled "Trip to the Moon" or "The Impossible Voyage"), but there is always so much to see, so much beautiful hand-made stylized decoration, and so much going on with so many characters in every shot, that I never find myself bored watching a Mèliés spectacular like "The Palace of the Arabian Nights". Robert Israel's excellent music in the Flicker Alley release completes the enjoyment of this movie.

Georges Méliès' Palace of the Arabian Nights is one of the large scale fantasies produced by this pioneering filmmaker once he'd moved past his early, simple trick films. The great popularity of his Voyage Dans la Lune ("A Trip To The Moon") prompted the director to emphasize spectacle, with troops of actors in exotic costumes, painted scenery flying in and out, camera trickery, contortionists in animal suits, etc., and all of those elements are on display here. There's plenty to see, but I must admit I sometimes prefer those earlier films, even the ones where Méliès himself is simply standing on a stage performing his magic tricks for an unseen audience. Those first films are so engaging and fun, and convey a fresh excitement about the possibilities of the new medium which still comes across a century later. Audiences today certainly enjoy Voyage Dans la Lune, with its charming sets and dreamlike atmosphere, but even there one can see that handling actors was not the director's strong suit. We are carried along by the sheer novelty of the thing and the narrative momentum, not by the performers, who barely register as people.

Arabians Nights is enjoyable, but even Méliès' fans will concede that it has some drawbacks, deficiencies which suggest some of the reasons behind the director's eventual decline and fall from public favor in later years. From the beginning, the pace is slow and stately, and for long stretches we feel as if we're watching a stage pageant deprived of sound rather than a silent movie. Solemn actors march past while the static camera sits somewhere in the middle of the auditorium. It took me a while to figure out which actor is the protagonist (Hint: he's wearing a striped robe and has a big mustache), and there are no title cards to explain the action. I gather that when these films were first shown narration was delivered to help clarify the story, but that doesn't help us as we watch today. The story concerns a virtuous young nobleman who must endure various hardships in order to win the hand of the Princess he loves. Does this sound familiar? Well yes, but the action is so vague in the opening scenes that it takes a while for viewers to get their bearings, even alert and sympathetic viewers.

Nevertheless, Palace of the Arabian Nights has its moments, especially in the second half. There's an encounter with a fire-breathing dragon, a fight with skeletons which prefigures Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, and transformations and other mystical effects along those lines. Méliès also liked to arrange dancing girls from the Folies-Bergère into picturesque configurations, like a Gallic Busby Berkeley, and several of these tableaux are presented here. This film is a pleasant diversion over all, but when we consider that Méliès' Star Film company continued to produce these pageant-like films year after year, recycling the same elements without developing or updating their cinematic technique any further, we start to understand why the company was out of business by 1914.

This is a bunch of spectacle with so much going on that it's hard to figure out who is doing what. As far as the Arabian Nights, what happened to Scheherazade and her staying alive by not finishing a story. Melies throws in everything but that kitchen sink (it may have been there; I couldn't see through all the stuff on stage). There are so many stories from the Arabian Nights from Ali Baba to Sindbad. Why not give some of those to us in a clearer, more understandable way.

This Georges Méliès fantasy feature is impressive visually, with all kinds of interesting detail in the settings, costumes, and the like, plus plenty of Méliès's renowned camera tricks. The story is interesting but often vague, and many of the details are now difficult or impossible to decipher. When Méliès made involved features like this, he used to write a verbal narrative designed to be read at the screening, to explain the action on the screen. Unfortunately, once that gets lost, it becomes very hard for future audiences to appreciate the movie as much as its original audiences did.

The story is the familiar one of a princess who is in love with a young man whom her father does not accept. So the young man has to go through all kinds of ordeals and trials in the hope of winning her hand after all. Many of the sequences are quite involved, and it is worth watching over again to piece together as much of the action as possible. Even then, it is probably not possible to catch all of the detail.

Yet regardless of the missing story details, like almost all of Méliès's movies it is worth seeing for the visual effects. His distinctive backgrounds are often stylized even for their time, but they are always interesting, and often quite elaborate. He throws in a generous supply of stop-action trick shots, pyrotechnics, offbeat choreography, and the like, all of which are good for their time.

This would not by any measure be among Méliès's best features, but then that is a very high standard. Those unfamiliar with his work would find many other Méliès movies more enjoyable than this, but like all of his movies, it still has enough to be worth watching.