Pretty Good

Fantastic!

Admirable film.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This early Williamson film is, for its time, quite advanced as it displays a rather exciting drama (with some violence to boot!) and apparently uses 4 scenes. You don't see a lot of that in 1900 films! (The reason I say 'apparently' is because a fragment of Williamson's film survives. Actually two fragmented versions do: One shows the attack part while the other displays a fragment of each of the 4 scenes. The attack fragment is on Kino's "Movies Begin" set).I don't know much about the Boxer Rebellion, but it appears the film is about a missionary's home being attacked, but luckily some sailors (well, they looked like sailors!) come to rescue the home. There's shooting and bloodshed and several corpses lying around and for 1900 this one's quite sophisticated. Most films in 1900 were very dull and were only a minute; this short film originally ran 4 minutes, for its time that was long! If you want to see this one check out the version on YouTube, because that's the one that shows parts of all 4 scenes, so that one gives us an idea of how the original was.

Attack on a China Mission (1900) It's hard to full judge this film because it originally ran four minutes but now it's just under 90 seconds. What we've got is a woman is pulled and dragged by a man as a group of people attack the mission. There's a violent gun battle that follows. ATTACK ON A CHINA MISSION is one of many films that were drawn from the headlines. Producers realized that people would go see movies about stories they had read about in the newspaper and this here is just one example. For the most part the film is entertaining thanks in large part to the gunfight, which actually leads to quite a few dead bodies, which wasn't all that common in 1900. This British film is certainly worth watching but lets hope the rest of it is located at some point.

Some of the previous reviewers have perhaps read more into this simple film than was intended by the maker.I think that it was intended as a simple "action" film for entertainment rather than a comment on the Chinese.The Boxer Rebellion was recent news, and many lurid accounts had appeared in the newspapers.The Boxers had done things just like depicted in the film.The film was made in England,explaining the architecture of the house.However, Europeans living in China often built their homes in the style of their own countries,so this is not unrealistic for China of the period.Claire Lee Chennault,leader of the Flying Tigers,in his memoirs mentioned French villas looming up incongruously out of the countryside around Kunming.

In the early days of the cinema, actual film of important historic events often wasn't available but the public clamored for news of the world. So, film companies began faking the news--making film of what people THOUGHT might be the actual events. A good example of this is the Edison film that purports to show the execution of the man that assassinated President McKinley. Another is this re-creation of this attack by Chinese peasants (the "Boxers") on a missionary and his family. Such attacks had happened, but given the sparsity of movie cameras, the scene was re-enacted for the public in this film. The problem is that the home and landscaping don't look particularly Chinese. Not a terrible film, but also not a particularly interesting or compelling one either.