The Untamable Whiskers

Nothing too special here - Melies draws a chalk picture and then becomes the picture he draws. Then becomes a clown and it ends up he's the devil and disappears.

6/10

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 It feels outdated, a relic of a different world where entertainment was quite different from today.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

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.

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.