The three-tableaux "The New Lord of the Village" is a lesser film from Georges Méliès's oeuvre. Without the narration based on those Méliès provided for his earlier work that accompany other films on the Flicker Alley DVDs or a catalogue description, this film becomes somewhat confusing. Fortunately, John Frazer's book "Artificially Arranged Scenes" is an excellent companion to watching Méliès's pictures-providing synopses based on those aforementioned sources. Yet, even Frazer comments on this one that, "There is a moral underlying this film presumably, but it is finally all rather labored and confused."
In "The New Lord of the Village", the Lord inspects a marketplace before being led by a gypsy to a cave. Many of the usual Méliès tricks abound in the cave, including a giant crab and toad, appearances and disappearances and flying superimposed ghosts. There's a tableau of "science, fortune and labor". The Lord relishes in the fortune, but the ghost of Caesar (at least, that's how Frazer describes this character, who doesn't remind me at all of Caesar) punishes the Lord by putting him in tattered rags and transforms the two commoners who accompanied him into noblemen. Back at the marketplace, however, the gypsy restores the social order, and the Lord is given to now sharing his wealth with his subjects. The labored and confused, quasi-Dickensian moral, it would seem, is a rather medieval one of social hierarchy being sustained by noblesse oblige--that is, the Scrooge-Lord's responsibility to take care of his subjects.
In "The New Lord of the Village", the Lord inspects a marketplace before being led by a gypsy to a cave. Many of the usual Méliès tricks abound in the cave, including a giant crab and toad, appearances and disappearances and flying superimposed ghosts. There's a tableau of "science, fortune and labor". The Lord relishes in the fortune, but the ghost of Caesar (at least, that's how Frazer describes this character, who doesn't remind me at all of Caesar) punishes the Lord by putting him in tattered rags and transforms the two commoners who accompanied him into noblemen. Back at the marketplace, however, the gypsy restores the social order, and the Lord is given to now sharing his wealth with his subjects. The labored and confused, quasi-Dickensian moral, it would seem, is a rather medieval one of social hierarchy being sustained by noblesse oblige--that is, the Scrooge-Lord's responsibility to take care of his subjects.