Addition and Subtraction
Tom Whisky ou l’illusionniste toqué, 1900, 1m00s
Star Film Catalogue No. 234
Tom Whisky performs a lively dance. Exhausted, he pulls up a chair and sits on it, only to find a woman appearing underneath him. He leaps up, grabs another chair, and the same thing happens - and then again with a third. The three women get up, and Tom pushes them together until they turn into a single, much larger woman. Alarmed, he pushes down on her head, shrinking her to a small child. This fails to meet with his satisfaction, so he pulls her up to the large woman again, and splits her into the original trio. He pulls out the chairs for them and lets them sit down… (print ends here)
The French title of this lively piece of knockabout slapstick translates as ‘Tom Whisky, or the Mad Illusionist’ - presumably the name is a reference to something lost in the mists of time (the novelist William Carleton has a character of that name in his Stories of the Irish, but it’s hard to see the connection), but we can safely assume that the raffish, bearded figure with his frenzied dancing goes by that name. In essence, this is a set of variations on an effect that Méliès previously created in The Famous Box Trick (Illusions fantasmagoriques, 1898), in which a child was “split” into twins with the aid of an axe and a well-timed jump-cut.
No such props are necessary for Tom Whisky - just a lively and possibly well-lubricated imagination as he conjures up three near-identical women, fuses them together to create a much plumper one (which he finds much less prepossessing, as indicated by his horrified reaction), shrinks her to create a child, and then puts everything into reverse so that he ends up with the original female trio. The print under review ends with him offering them chairs: it’s unclear whether this is the actual ending, though given the film’s minimal narrative content and running time in line with Méliès’ other single-reelers, this must certainly be a possibility.
What’s also striking about the film is the way the many jump-cuts have been carefully planned so that they integrate seamlessly with Tom Whisky’s whirling dance routine, which was clearly much less wild and random than it appears at first glance. Even though it’s obvious how they were created (to a large extent, this film harks back to Méliès’ earliest jump-cut experiments of 1896), the rapidity of his movements is clearly intended to distract the viewer’s eye from the trickery being performed elsewhere. It’s an age-old trick that an experienced stage magician like Méliès would have mastered long before he came anywhere near a camera.
Sadly, this untinted print used as the source for Flicker Alley’s DVD is in dreadful condition, and looks like a very poor-quality dupe. It’s extremely grainy, there’s lots of damage (which looks printed-in), and it’s so contrasty that Tom Whisky often appears as a silhouette: it’s just as well that the film is one of Méliès’s less subtle efforts. Robert Israel’s jaunty piano-and-violin accompaniment enhances the music-hall feel.
Links
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forums)