Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy

As a longtime fan of the early "trick films" I can heartily recommend this bizarre and ingenious exercise in nickelodeon surrealism. Although it doesn't display the boisterous showmanship of Georges Méliès' mini-epics, or rival the sheer beauty of Ferdinand Zecca's The Red Spectre (the trick film nonpareil), Princess Nicotine; or The Smoke Fairy can nonetheless hold its own as a clever, funny, and downright eerie exploration of the cinema's potential to capture fantasy on celluloid.

Produced at Vitagraph's Brooklyn studio, the film features a mustachioed actor named Paul Panzer who would become best known playing the villain in the famous serial The Perils of Pauline. Here we see Mr. Panzer as a proper Edwardian gentleman seated, presumably in his home, at a table as well stocked as any tobacconist's shop with cigars, cigarettes, pipe, loose tobacco, and wooden matches. As the film begins, the gentleman puts aside his newspaper and yawns and stretches in a histrionic fashion, suggesting he's already half asleep and that what follows may be a dream. Certainly what follows is dreamlike, for almost immediately the lid of a cigar box swings open and two fairies about the size of hamsters emerge. One fairy is a young girl while the other looks more mature and Glinda-like. The older fairy seems to be encouraging the girl to cause mischief, which she is only too happy to do. The gentleman realizes he is not alone when he attempts to light his pipe and finds a giggling fairy in the bowl, underneath the tobacco. The rest of the film involves a battle of wills between the gentleman and the fairy, as each one strives to hassle, harass, and torment the other. In the end, the battle is essentially a draw.

The filmmakers utilized every camera trick available at the time to achieve their desired effects, and may well have concocted new ones. Double exposure, reverse image, and stop-motion photography were all employed, as well as two old-time stage tricks: enlarged props and images reflected in mirrors. A book about motion pictures by Frederick Talbot published in 1912 devoted an entire chapter to this eight- minute film, and it's easy to see why: this movie represented state-of-the- art special effects for its day. Almost a century later, Princess Nicotine is still a delightful treat.

If you are looking at the top special effects magician in early cinema, there was no one more brilliant than VItagraph Studio's J. Stuart Blackton. In August 1909, he released one of the most eye-boggling movies to ever come out up to that time, "The Princess Nicotine, or The Smoke Fairy." Photographed by cinematographer Tony Gaudio, who filmed several Bette Davis movies later on as well as "Little Caesar (1931) and "The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Blackton used mirrors to create a miniature fairy instead of a double exposure in front of a black background to astonish the frustrated smoker (Paul Panzer) in the movie. Also introduced in cinema were the giant props to make the fairies' smoking world look realistic as well as several stop motion sequences. So awed by the trick effects when the film was released, the magazine Scientific American devoted an entire article in detailing how each special effect was performed.

Also, one of the first product placements in movies was in "Princess Nicotine" by using the brand Sweet Corporal cigarettes and cigars.

One of the two fairies in her film debut was played by the future popular silent movie star Gladys Hulette, who played in several early talkie movies. Her career, however, flamed out later on, so much so that in 1948 she resorted to being a ticket seller at the Radio City Music Hall in NYC.

The special visual effects and camera tricks in this short comedy are easily among the best and most resourceful of its era. Both the variety and the quality are impressive, and most of them are also amusing to watch, in addition to their technical skill. There's no telling how much trouble they had to go to in order to make them look this good, but it was worth it.

The story is very slight, serving only to set up the camera tricks. It features a pipe smoker who comes face to face with a couple of high-spirited miniature female fairies and their antics. The tiny fairy characters are completely realistic, with the double exposures being done with care. There are also other special effects using stop-action and other such techniques.

It's very short, only a few minutes long, but none of it is wasted. It's funny, and it's quite a display of technical skill given the limited resources of its era.

Over 100 years old now, but this film still contains some tricks that, while obviously not looking as realistic as today's computer-generated trickery, are at least as good as the stuff the likes of Ray Harryhausen was producing as late as the 1980s.

The film is quite unique in the way it combines long shots of the mischievous fairy capering on a table with close-ups of her standing amongst over-sized props, and it's a technique that enhances the realism of the special effects for the viewer. Today, it's easy to forget you're watching screen trickery when you see the same kind of special effects that are on display here, and too easy to be distracted by the flaws of vintage effects, but that's not the case with this one. It's likely that Vitagraph set out to make a blockbuster special effects movie with this one, and they quite obviously succeeded. Well worth seeking out.

A smoker falls asleep, and two mischievous fairies play with his pipe. He discovers this, and imprisons them in a cigar box. He removes a flower from the box, which contains a fairy smoking a cigarette.

Rating a film that is only five minutes long is a bit of a challenge. In this case, the title of the film is longer than the film itself. (Well, not literally.) But for 1909 it really deserves a lot of credit. The illusion of making people look small and interacting with full size people is easy today (2016), but for its time was probably not just a novelty but almost revolutionary. The Germans became the masters of trick cinema in the 1920s, but this clearly predates them...