Mary Jane's Mishap

Others here have praised George Albert Albert Smith for his innovative techniques in film making, and deservedly so. His experiments form the visual basis of modern screen grammar. Likewise, his wife, who played the sleepy, sloppy Mary Jane in this movie, give a performance that is tremendously advanced for the era. Clearly, Smith's experiments with close-up shots had convinced him that performers should keep their movements in strict bounds.

What the other reviewers have failed to mention is the essentially middle-class nature of this movie. It is not the lady of the house who blows the place up, but the maid-of-all-work. It's the perpetual complaint that "you can't get good help", usually with "anymore" appended. Not like when I was a youngster and people would murder each other to work for my grandfather. He would whip them daily, and they were grateful for it!

I used to hear the same thing when I was a child and no one thought I was listening.

George Albert Smith was one of cinema's most important pioneers--laying down much of the foundation of film grammar, including helping to introduce the multi-shot film, parallel action, the close-up, point-of-view shots, some trick photography effects, and other elements of editing and camera positioning. A good number of his innovations are on display in this short film, "Mary Jane's Mishap". If it can be said about such an ancient piece of cinema, this is Smith's masterpiece, in addition to being one of the most advanced films of its time (although many of Smith's movies and most movies from this era are lost or generally unavailable).

The first scene of the sluttish housemaid consists of a lot of scene dissection for 1903--cutting between a long shot of the kitchen and various close-ups of the housemaid's comedic actions and expressions, or, rather, the mugging of the camera by the director's actress-wife. (By the way, I find her performance, albeit outdated, has grown on me with repeated viewings.) These close-ups of expressions come from the tradition of early single shot films that were simply of facial expressions, of which Smith made quite a few--exploiting the novelty of the medium close-up made popular by Edison's "The Kiss" (1896). In "Mary Jane's Mishap", there's good match on action for continuity between the shots, too. Smith had already pioneered this structure in "The Little Doctors" (1901) and its remake "Sick Kitten" (1903), but few other filmmakers explored this kind of scene dissection at the time. Edwin Porter's film "The Gay Shoe Clerk" (1903), which was heavily influenced by Smith's work, is one exception.

There are nine shots, plus a tenth for the splice to accomplish the trick shot of replacing the actress with a dummy to shoot up the chimney, in the some two minutes of the first scene of "Mary Jane's Mishap". This is why I'm so hard on the photographed plays of the 1910s, because by 1903, they were already making films like this with complex and innovative visual and filmic ways of telling a narrative. Coincidentally, "Mary Jane's Mishap" was released the same year as "The Great Train Robbery". That film pioneered how to edit scenes together to serve form; this film did a similar service for the shots within the scene.

A comparison of shot counts between "Mary Jane's Mishap" and the more acclaimed and popular early films, Edwin Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" and Georges Méliès's "Le Voyage dans la lune" (1902) further illustrates the groundbreaking nature of Smith's film. "Mary Jane's Mishap" consists of 12 shots, with nine of those shots taking place within the first scene. Porter's film consists of 14 shots, which are all scenes in themselves. Thus, Porter's film consists of two more shots, but the film is about three times longer than Smith's film. Méliès's film, which is a couple minutes longer than Porter's film, consists of 16 shots, of which almost all were scenes in themselves. That's four more shots in about ten more minutes of nitrate.

In the rest of "Mary Jane's Mishap", Smith uses a wipe as a transition effect. I've only seen the wipe used earlier than this once--in Robert W. Paul's film "Scrooge; or Marley's Ghost" (1901). The view of the tombstone is an insert shot--a technique Smith was one of the first to pioneer. There are also a few typical trick effects here: the superimposed ghost, the stop-substitution effect, and the shooting up the chimney sequence.

Yet, to be critical, the shadows in the first scene make it obvious that the supposedly interior scene was filmed on an open-air stage, but this was typical in films until about the late 1910s. It's also evident that the film doesn't contain a very involving story, and it suffers in this respect if compared to such contemporary productions as "The Great Train Robbery" and "Le Voyage dans la lune". What narrative it has is essentially a bad joke on the Irish; Mary Jane is supposedly Irish, and the film makes fun of her (that is, of the Irish) being either illiterate or too stupid to realize the dangers of paraffin. Porter already used this story in his two-shot film "The Finish of Bridget McKeen" (1901), and one may call Smith's film a remake of it.

Nevertheless, this early film is exceptional. Yet, film enthusiasts and historians have neglected to give it much credit. It was so ahead of its time and unappreciated that many have believed D.W. Griffith when he claimed a decade later to have invented scene dissection, close-ups and other techniques. "Mary Jane's Mishap" is an excellent film for 1903; Smith pulls out all the then known tricks of film grammar for this one and then invents some more. Unfortunately, after about 1903, he gave up regular film production and spent the rest of his film-making career working on an inherently flawed two-color film process for Charles Urban called Kinemacolor. Hopefully, some of Smith's other films become available someday, especially his later ones, such as "Dorothy's Dream" (1903) (a fairytale film which supposedly was one of the first movies to use title cards) and "The Little Witness" (which the BFI lists as from 1905, but for which historian Stephen Bottomore lists as c.1903) (which from a still I've seen, had elaborately painted backdrops for the time and perhaps more of a plot than most of Smith's productions).

After a mishap with the boot blacking, a young woman uses paraffin to light the stove with fantastic, and fatal, results. George Albert Smith's silly four minute opus was quite a sophisticated film for the time, with scene changes, close-ups, split-screen, dissolves, and special effects (double exposures and substitution splices). Star Laura Bayley seems to be having fun, mugging to the camera with a shoe-polish mustache or prancing around as a ghost. One wonders if the scene of the young woman dramatically exiting the house via the chimney inspired similar scenes six decades later in Disney's 'Mary Poppins' (1964). Watch for the falling boots and the inquisitive cat. Silly fun, then and now.

This film is cute and watchable even today--and that's something you CAN'T say about many of the very early movies--particularly those of George Albert Smith. Most films of the day are of pretty mundane topics or are only about one or two minutes long. This film, in contrast, is longer and actually tries to have Mary Jane try to be a slapstick comedienne. She is a cook and doesn't seem to do anything right. While not great or amazing like the contemporary films of Georges Méliès, this is still pretty good and watchable--particularly the slapstick ending! Plus, films like this eventually led to films like those of the later and much more famous slapstick comedians, so historically it's pretty important.

This little feature from G.A. Smith is quite entertaining, and it is also nicely put together. Although the props and details are clearly from its own period, it also features a main character who could be at home in any era.

The story is a simple one, starting with Mary Jane (played by Smith's wife) as a kitchen maid who mugs for the camera as she goes about her chores. Although her antics are simple, it does a pretty good job for the era of making most of them work well. Then we see Mary Jane's 'mishap' and its macabre but amusing consequences.

Smith's wife proves to be a decent actress, and she makes her character pretty amusing. The mishap sequence also works well, with a clever special effect, and there is a good final gag. While it's nothing highbrow, it was made with skill, and it is still humorous nearly a century later.