The Untamable Whiskers

Untamable Whiskers (1904)

*** (out of 4)

aka Le Roi du maquillage

Once again Melies plays a magician who draws up various faces on a chalk board only to then turn himself into those images. The transformations scenes are all rather obvious but I must admit that these still hold up better than a majority of these same type of scenes from various "B" movies. There's really nothing too overly funny here but the film still has all sorts of magical qualities to it. This is one of the director's better known films and rightfully so.

I watched this as one of the shorts on The magic of Melies video cassette released by Kino on Video, 1994. Image quality was good. Music was chipper and matched the lighthearted mood of the film. No color was added. Cropping did not appear to interfere with the film, although it is hard to tell without titles. This should give an idea of the technical quality of the release I watched.

This film was mainly done to show off a particular special effect. A magician draws pictures on a chalkboard, and then his facial hair grows to fit the image he has drawn. This is part magic act, part comic routine. It is amusing, but special effects are so common today that it is not amazing, as it must have been to the people who first viewed it. Basically an image of the magician with one type of hair fades into an image of the same magician in the same position with another type of hair. The quality of this special effect is fairly good, so it didn't seem cheap, just redundant.

My recommendation is to watch it if you are interested in very early film history. It is a good example of a setup that is similar to a booth or simple theater show, but depicts something that could never be shown live. This film predates plots being the norm in movies, and itself has no plot.

Watching this film over 120 years after its release, I have to say the type of humor and tricks it uses no longer bring a smile to your face. It feels outdated, a relic of a different world where entertainment was quite different from today. However, it does inspire genuine respect, as the director was pioneering techniques that were truly novel and experimental at the time. This film focuses particularly on metamorphosis-in other words, shifting from one character or appearance to another right before our eyes. The director seemed especially fond of facial hair growth, so we see the main character's hair, beard, and mustache magically grow or shrink on screen. To add to the fun, he first sketches them on a blackboard, showing impressive drawing skills as well. Back then, this must have felt like real magic on screen. Interestingly, it has always been challenging to make this metamorphosis trick look smooth-even some films from the 1980s look quite rough. Of course, by the mid-2020s we've seen far more advanced effects, but this film comes from the dawn of the 20th century, when the film industry was just taking its first steps.

Georges Melies once again takes centre-stage as he plays a quick-sketch artist who possesses the ability to transform himself into whatever character he draws on his blackboard. Of course the transformation is performed by movie trickery, and for its time it is quite impressive, even though 105 years on it is easy to see the joins. Some of the characters Melies turns himself into are quite grotesque; one of them is a scary clown reminiscent of the villain in Stephen King's It, another a devil with horns and a cape. This is a simple movie lasting little more than two minutes, but it's hugely entertaining and gives the versatile Melies an opportunity to show off his artistic skills.

They didn't call Georges Méliès "the Magician" for nothing – though I am more partial to the great filmmaker's plot-driven masterpieces, he was also hugely popular for fascinating, special effects-driven snippets like this. Basically the cinematic equivalent of a magician's stage act, 'The Untamable Whiskers' gives Méliès an opportunity to show off the cross-fade effect, which allows him to fade discreetly between similar images.

A "man with whiskers" (played by the director himself) waltzes up to a blackboard and quickly sketches the image of a man with long hair. Shifting the board to the side, the man presents himself to the camera, stands still for a few moments and – voila! – he magically grows long hair. Méliès does this several times, experimenting with different hair styles, beard lengths and costumes. Best of all, he appears to be having a fun time doing it! Though the act (and the primitive special effect) is hardly interesting to modern audiences, the film has an odd charm about it, possibly aided by the director's apparently unyielding enthusiasm. Like any good stage magician, Méliès knows he's being clever, and I'm sure audiences back in 1904 were conversing amongst themselves about how on Earth he managed to pull it off!