User Reviews

At just about one minute, "The Secret Suitcase" is just a fragment of a longer film...and the fragment is all that remains. This is nOT unusual, as most early nitrate films have decomposed, melted or even caught fire, as the stock is very volatile.

Like many of Segundo de Chomón's films, this one is set on a stage. You see a bunch of costumed women holding flowers. In the foreground are two women who enter a box and the box levitates and explodes....and the film, unfortunately, ends here.

If you ever learn that the rest of the film is discovered, please let me know. As it is, it's probably not a film you need to see...and only crazy folks (like me) would watch this fragment. Difficult to rate because of its condition.

Not much can be said about Segundo de Chomón's "The Secret Suitcase" from 1908, apparently released as "De Geheimzinnige Koffer" in Germany. Only forty seconds of the entire movie--which must have been much longer originally--survive, and very little happens within the run-time to judge from. Like most of Chomón's work, this short film was also stencil-colored by the female staff at Pathé and still has a couple of different colors on the remaining scrap, adding an appealing visual aspect at least.

What's left of the short is a very brief scene of two women in breeches--one of them played by Julienne Mathieu, the director's wife--who do a few uninspired tricks. First, they grab at the clothes of some pretty girls standing against a backdrop and cause them to vanish. Then, throwing the clothes into what looks like a picnic basket (but probably the 'secret suitcase' itself, although there's nothing secretive about it) they transform the dresses into hats. After this, they jump inside the suitcase, whereupon it rises into the air in a puff of orange smoke.

Obviously, this was meant to be a magic show film like those of Chomón's rival Georges Méliès, but the tricks available seem very old. There is no masterful stop-motion animation like the director was also experimenting with that same year, and no cutting to closeups--making the thing seem very stagy and unimproved over the style of his rival. In addition, a few seconds at the beginning are damaged somewhat which makes a little bit of the action hard to view. Probably one of the director's less original magic films--but being a fragment that can't be said for certain.