The Cook in Trouble
| The Cook in Trouble | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Georges Méliès |
| Starring | Georges Méliès |
Production company | |
Release date |
|
| Country | French |
| Language | Silent |
Sorcellerie culinaire (scène clownesque), released in the US as The Cook in Trouble and in the UK as Cookery Bewitched, is a 1904 French silent trick film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 585–588 in its catalogues.[1]
Production
[edit]Méliès plays the cook in the film. Special effects used include pyrotechnics and substitution splices.[1]
The action of the film is a variation on the "trapdoor chase", a type of spectacular chase sequence particularly associated with the Lupino family of performers, including Lupino Lane. In Méliès's version, the trapdoors are designed as openings within the kitchen set: a window, an oven door, a pot, a drawer, and so on.[2] Describing the film for British exhibitors, Charles Urban's film catalogue called the result "acrobatic".[1]
Reception and survival
[edit]With its fast-paced antics, designed to build up a hectic visual rhythm rather than to advance a narrative, The Cook in Trouble has been seen as a particularly modernist Méliès film, presaging Dadaism and Surrealism[3] as well as Mack Sennett's chase films.[1] Film historian John Frazer, who praised The Cook in Trouble as "one of the high peaks among the films of Georges Méliès" and compared it with Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi,[4] commented:
The plot is largely irrelevant, being so encrusted by choreographed acrobatics. More than any other factor it is this bifurcating, simultaneous movement that gives this film its particularly modern feel.[4]
According to the summary in Méliès's American catalogue, The Cook in Trouble originally ended with the cook's clothes being retrieved from the cooking pot; this ending is missing from the surviving copy of the film.[1]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d e Essai de reconstitution du catalogue français de la Star-Film; suivi d'une analyse catalographique des films de Georges Méliès recensés en France, Bois d'Arcy: Service des archives du film du Centre national de la cinématographie, 1981, pp. 197–198, ISBN 2-903053-07-3, OCLC 10506429
- ^ Balducci, Anthony (2012), The Funny Parts: A History of Film Comedy Routines and Gags, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 145–46
- ^ Strauven, Wanda (1997), "L'art de Georges Méliès et le futurisme italien", in Malthête, Jacques; Marie, Michel (eds.), Georges Méliès, l'illusionniste fin de siècle?: actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 13–22 août 1996, Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, p. 343
- ^ a b Frazer, John (1979), Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., p. 144, ISBN 0816183686
