The 400 Tricks of the Devil

Good old Georges Melies shows his talents again with The 400 Tricks of The Devil. The story is of a group of travelers who are tormented by Satan in various ways. Not 400 but quite a numerous amount of tricks are played on them. The most famous part of this film is probably the scene with the horse and wagon. I say this because on YouTube it was the thumbnail image for every way to watch it and it's the poster on this site. Melies of course shows off his normal great special effects that he is known for, and I have found to be prominent in all of his films that I've seen with the exception of Why That Actor Was Late. Although not as good as say A Trip To the Moon, I still say to check it out if you're a big Melies fan.

The 400 Tricks of the Devil aka The Merry Frolics of Satan.

I guess I expected more out of this one from the title and some of the visuals are great but it's rather boring overall to me. We have the typical Melies-styled mechanically operated scenery which is neat to watch, the usual camera tricks where it appears people and furniture is to large for the trunks they are going into and out of and the fun imp frolics but this one seemed to be too long and drawn out in most of the scenes - for me it needed a bit faster paced scenes.

Worth watching in-spite of my mediocre review.

6/10

This Georges Méliès film is another imaginative fantasy. It's effects-driven, not story-based. The visuals are everything. What plot there is merely serves as a structure to base the visual wizardry around. It features a couple of travellers who are persecuted by the devil. They are taken on a carriage ride through the cosmos led by a skeletal horse.

It's quite common material for a film from the 1900's. For some reason stories featuring Satan were common-place. Anyway, this one is very nice to look at. The ride through outer space is hypnotic and dream-like with an array of intergalactic attractions passing the stagecoach by. The colour tinting of course helps a lot. It's very effectively used here and is quite explosive in the scene with the volcano with an eruption of deep red. It's a trip worth taking.

"The Merry Frolics of Satan" is a fairly enjoyable fantasy adventure from early cinema magician Georges Méliès. As historian Richard Abel ("The Ciné Goes to Town") points out, these spectacles from Méliès were becoming increasingly elaborate and expensive to produce, especially by comparison to the smaller costs of his competitor's films, such as those by Pathé. As with some of his other pictures around this time, "The Merry Frolics of Satan" was produced specially for music-hall screenings. In this case, it was for the Chatelet's stage féerie "The Merry Deeds of Satan", from which this film is based (Abel).

In the film, Satan, disguised as a person, leads some misfortunate people on a hellish journey, including via a train the size of a child's amusement ride and a phantom carriage pulled by an apocalyptic skeletal horse. In the end, they're roasted by performers dressed in pig-like costumes. "The Merry Frolics of Satan" has its moments, including the phantom-carriage ride where movement is simulated by a moving backdrop of space stuff. This scene has become famous for having been used in many documentary clips on Méliès and early cinema. The print available from Flicker Alley is also hand-colored and tinted and includes narration. Yet, Méliès, unfortunately, also seemed to be relying more on theatrical tricks and less on cinematic ones as he had in his earlier spectacles. Stop-substitution splices and multiple-exposure photography remained the basis for his single-scene trick films, but his longer multi-scene fantasy adventures seemed to be becoming increasingly theatrical. The preference to use trap doors here instead of stop motion and editing for appearances and disappearances seems to evidence this increased theatricality.

Two men are in a carriage being pulled by a skeletal horse. Satan comes along and begins messing with them...pushing the carriage into a volcano and then tossing it into space (this version of space looks much like it did in the director's earlier effort, "Le Voyage Dans la Lune" (1902). Then, the men fall out of the carriage and fall to Earth--crashing through the ceiling of some mansion and ruining the dining room. Soon Satan arrives and pulls one of them into Hell, where imps and pretty girls run about the place. Soon, they attach the guy to a rotisserie and roast him...and the film ends.

This is an enjoyable but disjoint and occasionally confusing film. And, as usual, the director, Georges Méliès, plays the Devil. It's clever and fun....and similar to a few of his other films. Worth seeing but far from a must-see picture.