User Reviews

Another in the campaign conducted by Gaumont and Pathe to take over Melies' market by producing movies that cost far more than he could afford -- the stencil method of tinting the prints that Pathe used here was too expensive for Melies to replicate regularly. Within a year Melies' production would be sputtering and in 1912, he would go out of business, to spend the last 27 years of his life running a subway stand -- indeed, he grew so depressed over his failure that he destroyed all of his prints.

Segundo de Chomon, Pathe's inventive director, experiments with getting away from the proscenium arch, and simplifying the design to dice patterns. The appearing and disappearing, the backward-running sequences and so forth are all as carefully planned as anything by Melies, but the lack of Beaux Artes design robs the picture of lushness and mystery. But by this point, it didn't really matter any more.

Georges Méliès was a famous French filmmaker who merged movies with his first career, magic. In many of his movies, he appears to make things appear, disappear and change into other things, simply by stopping the camera and making the changes and then starting up the camera once again. Now, it's a simple trick that most can figure out quickly but back in the day he wowed audiences with these innovations. And, back in the late 19th and early 20th century, being an innovator meant that your work would be imitated, copied or stolen outright...and since he was very successful, many filmmakers liberally 'borrowed' from his films. Among the best and most prolific of these 'borrowers' (insert the word 'thieves' if you'd like) was the Spanish-born director Segundo de Chomón, who based dozens and dozens of this films on the Frenchman's work. In some cases, such as "Les Dés Magiques", it was inspired by Georges Méliès...in others, he simply remade the film...nearly duplicating the other filmmaker's work.

In this film, as in many others, there isn't a lot of plot. Instead, it consists of a person playing a magician who makes all sorts of things seem to happen....some of which was done through stop motion (such as appearing and changing characters) and some by rolling the film backwards (making towers of dice appear to stack themselves). None of it is brilliant but it is well done and clever.