The Untamable Whiskers

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 It feels outdated, a relic of a different world where entertainment was quite different from today.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.

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.

This simple but clever Georges Méliès short feature is fairly amusing, and the technique is, as always with Méliès, as good as you could have found at the time. The visual effects are generally pretty smooth, and on some occasions they are nearly seamless as one image dissolves into another.

There isn't really a story, just a simple series of visual effects, with Méliès himself using a chalkboard and a handful of other props to present a series of gags involving the "Untamable Whiskers". While most of the gags are not all that much in themselves, one or two are relatively creative. Most of the creativity in this feature, though, is found in just making the camera tricks work.

Even the less smooth among Méliès's camera effects are usually at least as good as the dreary, often clumsy, computer-generated imagery that mars so many present-day pictures. The simplest of the early Méliès features, such as this one, look at least as good, and they could very well still have an audience long after all but the best of the computerized features of today have been forgotten.

The premise is simple; the execution is not. Melies draws faces on a chalkboard. After each drawing, he stands front and center and become the picture. Eventually, our old friend the devil takes his turn after being drawn. The neat thing in this is the ability to match up these chalk drawings with the figures Melies creates. Very good.