User Reviews

An amusing short which features plenty of the usual Georges Melies camera tricks, which are as impressive as ever. It's amazing to see decapitations and the like on screen this early, but they get shown in their full glory. The highlight comes at the end of the film where the executioner himself is chopped in half and both halves try to put themselves back together again. It's a memorable moment.

Melies' shorts, like this one here, usually only had the one location with a painted background. They highlighted loads of early forms of special effects and also explored techniques which are still used in films today. As a method of experimentation, they're fascinating, and surprisingly well made. This is as good as an example as any of the genius of Melies. It's also a good early example of the "body horror" sub-genre which made films like RE-ANIMATOR so famous, eighty years later.

'Le Bourreau Turc' is one of the 'stunt' films of Georges Melies, although with more of a plot than usual. My late wife Diane owned an 8mm acetate print of this movie, which she bought in the 1970s from Blackhawk Films. Whenever she showed this short movie for guests, they invariably cheered during the decapitation, and they always asked her to rewind the film and show this bit over.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT. A huge Turkish executioner, wearing a turban and cummerbund, and clutching an enormous scimitar, mans his stall in the bazaar. A gaoler arrives with a chain-gang of four prisoners. The Turk aims his scimitar, and ... WHAP! ... all four heads are cut off in a stroke, and the four headless men collapse onto four stools. No worries, parents: this violence is done cartoonishly, with no bloodshed. It's all down to trick photography. The Turk casually picks up the heads and flings them into a dustbin. Then he goes to sleep. (No conscience problems for our lad Abdullah.) While the executioner sleeps, the four bodiless heads climb out of the dustbin and torment him. Ghoulish? No; as it's staged here, the sequence is funny and bizarre but not especially frightening. My only complaint is that the trick photography is a trifle too obvious. Yes, I realise that this movie was made a hundred years ago ... but several of Melies's other trick films from this period didn't show the joins quite so obviously.

Georges Melies was a brilliant showman but a terrible businessman. He generally sold outright the exhibition prints of his films, rather than licencing them for hire. Consequently, an entrepreneur would buy one of Melies's movies, dupe it off as many times as needed, and make huge profits whilst Melies made only his fee for the original sale. Sadly, Melies spent his last years in poverty. More than a decade after making his last film, Melies had a chance reunion with one of his former actresses who was now scrimping out a tiny income selling toys in a railway kiosk. Melies married her, and helped run this pathetic little business. Belatedly, a tiny pension from the French government made his life slightly more comfortable. One more neglected genius, alas. I'll rate 'Le Bourreau Turc' 9 out of 10.

Had I never seen Georges Méliès' LE VOYAGE DANS LE LUNE, then I might have scored LE BOURREAU TURC a 10--it was that outstanding a silent short. The problem is that LE VOYAGE DANS LE LUNE was so outstanding a film that his other shorts don't quite match up--though they are still head and shoulders beyond what his contemporaries were doing. Instead of the usual boring everyday scenes made popular by Lumiere and Edison (I am sorry, but they don't really age well), Méliès took cinema many steps further--telling stories, having a sense of humor and doing tricks that were simply amazing for the time.

Here, we have a very simple short that is made incredible by the camera tricks. The film opens with four prisoners being ushered in. The four men have their heads poking through a plank and the executioner appears to slice off all four heads. Then, in true Georges Méliès fashion, the heads appear and disappear and are finally reunited with their bodies. And, in a funny variation that is unique, one of the men in sliced in half and his lower portion runs about as the rest of the body is sitting their--helpless. Finally, the body is reunified and the film ends.

Many of these tricks have been seen in other films by this genius, but here they all come together so well that you can't help but be charmed by it all. A wonderful film.