Better Late Then Never

A Disappointing Continuation

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

. . . perhaps is the best way to describe Edwin S. Porter, the director of the Edison Manufacturing Company 6 minute, 27-second-long 1906 short DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND and Winsor McCay, the newspaper comic script cartoonist upon whose Jan. 28, 1905 strip for the New York EVENING TELEGRAM this film is based. At a time when Edison's competitors were churning out three flicks daily (not unlike Valley porn creators of the late 1900s) to meet a supply shortage ( = making more money), Porter dilly-dallied with this comparatively short piece for EIGHT WEEKS, as if he were fine-tuning the Mona Lisa's smile. The most original things the normally glib liars who typed out the Edison Film Catalogs could come up with in regard to their RAREBIT FIEND product--pegged at $70.50, pricey for its day--was calling Porter's film strip "humorously humorous and mysteriously mysterious" (how long would a character last on AMC's show MADMEN with such paucity of verbal gifting?). Similarly, McCay's original scripts featured scribbled dialog balloons, which were illegible when reproduced in the newspaper. The phrase which best sums up McCay and Porter's approach to mass entertainment: "I'm just gonna do what I want to do, hang the public!"

Placed under the "American Surrealism" genre, apparently, this film is still a fun and very quirky look into the effects of binge drinking.It's rather absurd and silly by today's standards but the silliness lends itself to a sort of contemporary audacity not really seen in very much cinema anymore. Multiple exposures are the special effects trick of this film as the fiend goes through many harrowing experiences, my favorites including his flying over the city and the little demons pounding on his head.It never ceases to amaze me how fast cinema developed from boring and cumbersome shots of factories and people moving to narratives and special effects. Whether this film is any "good" by the standards of then or now doesn't interest me anymore. It's fun and has an air of historicalness to it that makes it worth the time.--PolarisDiB

Although Edwin S. Porter is well known as the director of THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, the landmark short that combined a good story line, cross-editing and other remarkable techniques for its era, his role in American cinema history has largely been relegated to a footnote: Edison invents the motion picture camera, goes the hagiography, and Griffith comes along and perfected the story-telling of cinema. And, oh yeah, Porter directed this movie in 1902 that is actually all right. But Porter was actually a wildly experimental cineaste. In more than 100 movies, he experimented with cross-cutting, story-telling, breaking the fourth wall -- remember at the end of THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY where the robber shoots a gun at the audience? -- and did lots of camera tricks, particularly here, where there are a couple of shots that have triple exposures.... and in an era when everything had to be done in the camera, using masks and stopwatches, he got some remarkable effects, which he used with great good humor.This trick movie is based on Windsor McKay's DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND series of cartoons. McKay did a series of cartoons based on it in the early 1920s, but this is pretty heady stuff for the era. It was Edison's blockbuster for 1906 -- they sold 192 copies of the film!

This movie uses the basics of movie making to their maximum and that's why its just as good today.