User Reviews

Placed under the "American Surrealism" genre, apparently, this film is still a fun and very quirky look into the effects of binge drinking.

It's rather absurd and silly by today's standards but the silliness lends itself to a sort of contemporary audacity not really seen in very much cinema anymore. Multiple exposures are the special effects trick of this film as the fiend goes through many harrowing experiences, my favorites including his flying over the city and the little demons pounding on his head.

It never ceases to amaze me how fast cinema developed from boring and cumbersome shots of factories and people moving to narratives and special effects. Whether this film is any "good" by the standards of then or now doesn't interest me anymore. It's fun and has an air of historicalness to it that makes it worth the time.

--PolarisDiB

"Dream of a Rarebit Fiend" is a 7-minute black-and-white film from over 100 years ago. Wallace McCutcheon, Edwin S. Porter (especially) and Winsor McCay (mostly animation) belonged to the best film had to offer these days back then, so you could certainly expect something here. However, the final result is slightly underwhelming. We follow the Rarebit Fiend, played by Jack Brawn, and witness what he experiences after he had slightly more than one drink too many. However, I must say, the absurdities displayed in here made me think that it may not only have been alcohol that he consumed. All in all, not one of the best films of its era and I cannot recommend the watch. Thumbs down. The only reason to watch this I can think of is maybe for how weird it is.

In one respect, it's funny how people complain that nearly all commercial film has to offer these days is a never-ending range of special effects, rather than focus on characterization in order to move a story forward. I won't exactly defy this opinion, but I find it interesting because one may say that's pretty much how narrative cinema began its course, attracting audiences with its ability to go beyond physical laws and still let the special effects remain a mystery. Surely the earliest films of a Méliès or a Porter could not offer much depth in terms of characterization, which was one reason why they could never, according to most at the time of their making, be considered a threat to the art of live theater. Even so, these films were still bound to fascinate as their fantastic visual extensions seemed to require no compromises.

Initially based on a comic strip by Winsor McCay and featuring vaudevillian Jack Brawn, THE DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND may not strike one as Edwin S. Porter's most outstanding achievement. He had behind him THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, which for its time was remarkably complex in structure and photography, so by comparison, the nightmares of a man-about-town who has allowed himself too much food and drink in one evening appears rather anchored in the vaudeville-tradition, less uniquely suited for the possibilities of film. At least it's easy to think in that direction at first. However, Porter does not disappoint; through inventive, unpredictable use of the camera, he did in 1906 make a strong case as to just why film deserved to be estimated as a medium on its own terms, rather than being compared to the theater stage. Certainly the feeling of intimacy provided by live actors performing on a real stage cannot be obtained with film, but Porter's recognition of film's advantages to the theater stage is one of the things which make his films so enjoyable to this day, THE DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND being no exception. Plotwise it may be rather ordinary, but it's what Porter does with this much-used topic that is the point. The clever effects have a close to dazzling effect at times, and it's not hard to see why it has later gained a reputation as a "surreal" work. That Porter, like Méliès, chose to explore the technical aspects of film- making in the earliest days, rather than consider more advanced methods of telling a story, may simply have been because even they were unable to foresee the full potential of the new medium; but seen in retrospect, to let technique come before dramaturgy was in fact a necessity. Every creative medium is a handcraft in essence, and the rules must be settled before they can be questioned.

I saw two versions of this live-action version of Winsor McCay's comic strip Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. The Google Video version had music suitable for the era and film. The YouTube version (which Google now links to as well) used Carl Stalling's music for Warner Bros. cartoon shorts along with Treg Brown's sound effects that seemed WAY unsuitable. Director Edwin S. Porter gives wonderful visual touches throughout from the whirling lamppost sequence to depict drunkenness to the bed jumping up and down while the drunk tries to sleep to his dreams of three devils picking at his head to him hanging on a swinging weather vane. Two bad the print of both versions were downright poor with washed out frames nearly constantly. Recommended mainly for film enthusiasts.

. . . perhaps is the best way to describe Edwin S. Porter, the director of the Edison Manufacturing Company 6 minute, 27-second-long 1906 short DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND and Winsor McCay, the newspaper comic script cartoonist upon whose Jan. 28, 1905 strip for the New York EVENING TELEGRAM this film is based. At a time when Edison's competitors were churning out three flicks daily (not unlike Valley porn creators of the late 1900s) to meet a supply shortage ( = making more money), Porter dilly-dallied with this comparatively short piece for EIGHT WEEKS, as if he were fine-tuning the Mona Lisa's smile. The most original things the normally glib liars who typed out the Edison Film Catalogs could come up with in regard to their RAREBIT FIEND product--pegged at $70.50, pricey for its day--was calling Porter's film strip "humorously humorous and mysteriously mysterious" (how long would a character last on AMC's show MADMEN with such paucity of verbal gifting?). Similarly, McCay's original scripts featured scribbled dialog balloons, which were illegible when reproduced in the newspaper. The phrase which best sums up McCay and Porter's approach to mass entertainment: "I'm just gonna do what I want to do, hang the public!"

I thought this short was very well done. It is one of the few silent films that still fascinates and intrigues today, as it is chock-full of special effects. Some of this Edwin S. Porter borrowed from Georges Melies, who made many dream films similar to this one. But I actually think Porter did a much better job here than Melies would've done and his effects are a step ahead.

In this 5 minute short, a rarebit fiend (for those who don't know what that is, it's rabbit, so this guy is obsessed with cooked rabbit) gorges himself and not long after he's finished he starts hallucinating (he also had too much alcohol as well). The world spins around him (this is a simply amazing effect and looks excellent even today), and he cannot make his way home. A man helps him home where he gets in bed and starts to have terrible dreams. His bed flies through mid air above the city and he gets caught on a weather-vane. The effects all look amazing. The most well-known sequence of the movie would have to be the demons picking away at the guy's head.

The whole thing is just weird and is very good for 1906. I mean, it sold 192 copies! Cool and something that is still watchable today.