Mary Jane's Mishap

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.

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.

Casting his wife as the Mary Jane of the title, George Smith produced this engaging and technically impressive comedy. Longer than some of his other films this opens with a few minutes of his wife mugging like a good 'un with some boot polish. She is terrible by modern standards but silent movie acting is a different craft and it requires flamboyance and overacting – which she delivers no doubt. After this we get some good effects as Mary Jane blows herself up leading to what I assume was a moral. However Smith marks himself out again by producing a "Carrie" moment half a century before De Palma was even put on earth.

It is a nice surprise and I'm sure it must have caused quite a stir at the time. Yet again another example of Smith being a pioneer of the art – and not a bad little film at the same time.

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.

This early British comedy is fairly entertaining on first viewing but doesn't hold up well to scrutiny upon repeated screenings. That's not really a criticism of the film itself as the state of the nascent industry back in 1903. Films were still fairly primitive, the idea that they might tell a narrative instead of simply capturing glimpses of real life still a new one.

Influential Brighton filmmaker George Albert Smith brings plenty of tricks and innovative ideas to this tale of a dotty housemaid (played by his wife) who manages to blow herself up by lighting the kitchen stove with paraffin before returning from the grave to frighten passers-by.

Smith combines long, medium and close shots to tell his tale which looks at first like a variety act before the 'mishap' sparks a quick succession of camera trickery that moves the story onto a supernatural aspect.

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.