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 It feels outdated, a relic of a different world where entertainment was quite different from today.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

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!

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.

Like many of the films of Georges Méliès, the director himself is the star of this little silent film. He is an artist who draws pictures on a chalk board. Then, moments later, he magically is transformed into the image on the board! It's all cute fun and shows Méliès roots as a stage magician. While the film isn't as outrageous, complex or original as his more famous works (such as Le Voyage Dans le Lune), it is still head and shoulders above other films of the time. In general, his competitors (such as Lumiere and Edison) were filming very mundane scenes from real life (sort of like short and boring home movies). Georges Méliès storytelling and creativity make this film transcendent of the age and well worth seeing even today.

If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

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.