The Hat with Many Surprises
Le Chapeau à surprise, 1901, 2m34s
Star Film Catalogue Nos. 371-372
A man clad in top hat and tails enters a well-appointed drawing room, tips his hat to the audience, and places it on a small table. He takes off his coat, and shakes a larger table out of it. After adjusting the positioning of the new table, he drapes his coat over it, and it turns into a white tablecloth. He picks up his hat, and reveals that it’s empty. He then pulls four plates out of it and lays them on the tablecloth. He returns to the hat, and pulls out a set of four glasses and napkins, which he lays out next to the plates. He pulls a carafe of water and a bottle of wine out of the hat, and then some cutlery. He returns to the hat, and looks at it quizzically before producing a fan out of his pocket and waving it. Both fan and hat take on gigantic proportions. He climbs onto a stool to reach inside the hat, from which he retrieves four chairs and places them round the table. He tilts the hat forwards to reveal that it’s empty, but then extracts a man and two women, who take their places around the table. He turns the hat upside down and shakes it, and a second man emerges. The host places the hat back on his head, and it shrinks to normal size. He invites his guests to sit down, then conjures up a serving maid, who gives them food. The host looks conspiratorially at the audience, and then leaps onto the table - which disappears into the floor, taking the host with him. A picture on the wall comes to life, and looks highly amused. The host re-emerges on the other side of the room, laughing heartily as his guests leave in a huff. The picture reverts to its static form. The host picks up the discarded tablecloth and tosses it in the air. When it descends onto his shoulders, it turns back into his coat. He picks up his top hat, bows and leaves.
The Hat with Many Surprises is a delightful illustration of Georges Méliès’ seemingly boundless ability to ring virtuoso variations on what initially seems to be a decidedly familiar tune. Though the central scenario, of a ‘magician’ playing various jump-cut-engendered tricks on both the viewer and the film’s other characters is now so well known as to be somewhat hackneyed (in terms of his surviving films, these date back to The Vanishing Lady/Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin, 1896, but there are countless more recent examples), this film comes up with what appears to be a genuinely fresh approach.
As ever, Méliès himself plays the host-magician, and it’s tempting to assume from his top hat and tails that he’s got home from giving some kind of public theatrical performance, and can’t resist offering us a private one. (He acknowledges the viewer almost at the very start, and will often turn to us conspiratorially between tricks). Most of the illusions he goes on to perform are based on the age-old rabbit-in-the-hat routine, the only twist here being that a rabbit is just about the only thing he doesn’t produce from the hat - which also expands to giant size when required to disgorge furniture and even guests. (The latter, incidentally, are dressed in period costume, and may well represent specific historical figures).
Although from a technical viewpoint this is largely familiar stuff, the timing of the business with the coat (which disgorges a table before transforming itself into a tablecloth) is impressively adroit, and the moment towards the very end when a portrait comes to life is delightfully unexpected. Instead of returning to the superimposition technique featured in The Mysterious Portrait (Le Portrait mystérieux, 1899), Méliès here prefers a jump-cut switch to a real actor emerging from the canvas, the better to create a suitably 3-D effect when he’s laughing at the discomfited guests.
The untinted source print on Flicker Alley’s edition is one of the better examples, with relatively minimal surface damage and plenty of fine detail. The Mont Alto Orchestra’s attractive accompaniment neatly parallels what’s happening on screen by presenting a theme and variations, at one point deliberately missing a beat as the fourth guest takes more time than expected to emerge from the hat.
Links
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)