The Untamable Whiskers

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.

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.

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.

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