User Reviews

I love Melies works, but this one, in which some toughs rob a drunk and then set off a bunch of fireworks to wake him from his efforts to sleep it off, is the worst one I have seen. There are some lovely acrobatics involved, but, alone among all his works, it lacks all sense of charm. Ay wheel, even Jove nods and it's good to see a Melies picture, good bad or indifferent.

This is one of the many previously lost or infrequently seen Melies pictures that have been made available by Serge Bromberg, David Shepherd and a myriad of other hands in the newly issued DVD set GEORGES MELIES: FIRST WIZARD OF CINEMA. Required viewing for anyone interested in the history of movies ..... and a lot of fun.

Not a great effort. It starts with a woman standing in front of a fireworks store. She is accosted by an old guy with a beard. He is drunk and she tires of his advance and she slugs him. As he lies in the street, a group of rowdies rob him. They then break into the fireworks store and steal some stuff. They set it up around the old man and watch as he writhes in panic as the fireworks go off. It is almost over when another barrage hits. At the end the men smile at the camera. I guess the suffering of an old man was acceptable.

Like nearly all of director Georges Méliès' films, this one was filmed inside the studio he built for making movies. As such, the backgrounds are clearly painted cloth backdrops (pretty common for 1905). But what ISN'T common is his using fireworks inside this studio...something which seems incredibly dangerous!

The story itself, like many of the director's films, has an incredibly simple plot. After a man and woman argue, a drunk bearded man arrives and makes a nuisance of himself so she leaves. He then falls on the ground and is instantly asleep. Soon several dancing, prancing men arrive. They break into the fireworks shop and place fireworks around the drunk and light them...with supposedly hilarious results.

This film is simple and a bit mean-spirited...and certainly should have come with the phrase "Kids, don't try this at home!". Worth seeing if you love Méliès, otherwise pretty skippable.

Unexpected Fireworks (1905)

** (out of 4)

aka Un Feu d'artifice improvisé

The nice thing about going through Flick Alley's terrific Melies set is that they offer up some films you really wouldn't expct to see from the director. This here is one of them as a man keeps bothering a woman by pinching her so she finally knocks him out. Then, a bunch of drunks break into a firework store and place them around the man to give him a big shock. There's really nothing special, magical or too interesting about this film other than it's something different from Melies. There's really not too much comedy and the only real entertainment comes from seeing all these fireworks going off in front of the actor and wondering how on Earth he didn't get seriously injured.

Although "Unexpected Fireworks" is often dismissed as being one of the poorer Méliès pictures, due to its lack of obvious special effects and its realistic setting, it does have an interesting backstory that at least makes it slightly more interesting to the casual viewer. Made in 1905, the film is a comedy a couple years before Méliès's output would transition into slapstick, and thus rather unexpected in itself considering the director was still producing his usual trick and fantasy shorts that year, which were going out of style. Not a bad attempt by any means, but definitely not an especially good movie even for a comedy and rather strange in and of itself.

Production of "Unexpected Fireworks" began when André Méliès, the filmmaker's young son at four years of age, told his father about a dream he had one night in which some pranksters set off some fireworks around a sleeping drunk. That's exactly what happens in this film - a black comedy rather out of place in the Star Film Catalogue, but serving as a sort of symbol of what the cinemagician was all about. Méliès was a dreamer, a dreamer demonstrating with his work that films can show anything we want them to, be it adventures, real life, and yes, dreams. It is thus somewhat fitting that one of his own movies would be a literal depiction of a fantasy that formerly existed only in the mind of his son. An interesting anecdote, that, although the analyzation is somewhat limited considering the realistic setting of the picture.

As for the film itself, there is little to note without this story in mind except for the ending, in which the pranksters run up to the camera and mug before walking off. It's rare for actors in a Méliès film to break the fourth wall in this manner (aside from the magician films), much less be so close to the camera in medium closeup. An odd film and a definite stand out in the director's catalog, but of some note considering these things which are unclear to the average person.