The Night Before Christmas

Okay, all of you that CAN'T or WON'T look at an early silent film without immediately dismissing or laughing at it can stop reading this review. The likelihood you would even try watching this film or stick with it is absurdly low, so this review is more for lovers of historically important cinema. For 1905, this is an incredible picture in so many ways. The sets for the time were extremely expensive and complex. The special effects, though surely out of date, also took a lot of imagination and planning. So for a 1905 production, this film screams 'quality' from start to finish.

The movie is the poem THE NIGHT BEFORE Christmas and as the lines are written out on inter-title cards, the action takes place on the screen. Because of this, the film is short and relatively simple, but compared to the other films of the era, the movie is still very engaging today and worth seeing from an historical and curiosity standpoint. About the only negative, and you can't blame the film's producers, is that the version I watched online had a soundtrack from a much later sound cartoon in the public domain. It just didn't match the film and I had to turn the volume down since it was so annoying.

this is by far my favourite movie I've ever seen... I loved it and if you haven't seen it I recommend it. (though your going to have a rough time looking for it...) i saw it on pay-per-view in 1997. it was Christmas time at my house and I had a great time watching this movie. it is the most compassionate movie ever made in the history of history... I think that other than this movie, the passion of the Christ would be my favourite movie. if you liked the passion of the Christ watch this movie... it is an inspiring of the extremely famous children's story. in my opinion anyone should pick up this movie and watch it. 10/10

Twixt shots of Santa feeding the reindeer and polishing off one last puppet for the poppets, scenes of a family in the parlor celebrating Christmas Eve, children having a pillow fight, and some cute miniature work of the sleigh carrying gifts traveling over snow, we get verses of Clement Clark More's "A Visit From Saint Nicholas."

It's just the thing to watch during Christmastide in my apartment in Chelsea in Manhattan, where Moore wrote the poem so many years ago, helping to establish our modern idea of Old St. Nick. It captures the spirit of the poem perfectly. As another classic of the season urges, G*d bless us, every one.

This early holiday-themed feature is enjoyable to watch, and it is also a good example of Edwin S. Porter's style in filming special effect or fantasy movies. The story, loosely based on the theme of the poem "The Night Before Christmas", is old-fashioned in a good way that works pretty well. It's also one of the earlier movies to feature the use of cross-cutting or parallel editing.

The story alternates between two story lines, with 'Santa Claus' getting everything ready for his December 24 deliveries, while at the same time the children from a large family are having difficulty falling asleep due to their excitement. The 'Santa' portions flesh out the standard legend with Porter's characteristic style, and the family sequences are easy to identify with, for just about anyone who remembers being a child.

As director and cinematographer, Porter takes his usual approach with this kind of material. Rather than striving to make the settings and visual effects seem as lifelike as possible, he instead aims to make them interesting and pleasing to look at in their own right. It works well here, and the images seem to fit in well with the story. It's short (less than ten minutes), yet the length seems just about right, and it makes for an entertaining little movie.

Considering we were in the birth of the cinema, this does a decent job of portraying at least part of the classic poem. It begins with Santa preparing, getting the reindeer ready, and finishing a couple toys. Cut to a big multi-generational family, getting the kids ready, stockings hung, kids in bed, and so on. The kids have a nurse so they must be wealthy. When a little guy stirs them up, a pillow fight ensues, quite a dramatic effect. The plot can't get any more simple, but it showed off the technology of the time.