The Famous Box Trick (1898) User Reviews

Stage and Film Magic

[boblipton · 7/10 · 13 March 2008]

Melies started out as a stage magician, but he quickly learned and invented a lot of film magic too, which he uses to great and good effect in this effort: the one where he slices the boy in half is wonderful. It's a thirty-second magic act, little more, but must have been a real jaw-dropper when originally shown.

This is one of the many previously lost or infrequently seen Melies pictures that have been made available by Serge Bromberg, David Shepherd and a myriad of other hands in the newly issued DVD set GEORGES MELIES: FIRST WIZARD OF CINEMA. Required viewing for anyone interested in the history of movies ..... and a lot of fun.

The Famous Box Trick review

[JoeytheBrit · 6/10 · 22 April 2020]

Georges Melies turns a pigeon into a boy and a boy into two boys (with an axe) with his usual energetic showmanship. It's trick photography rather than magicianship, but it's still impressive for its day.

Famous Box Trick

[Michael_Elliott · 28 March 2008]

Famous Box Trick, The (1898)

*** (out of 4)

aka Illusions fantasmagoriques

In this film Melies plays a magician and we are entertained with various tricks related to a wooden box. As to be expected, the special effects are very good here and they remains very believable even after a hundred years. One of the tricks deals with Melies putting a boy in the box and making him disappear and there's another good gag of splitting the boy in two and making him two different kids. The film runs just over a minute and manages to be very entertaining for that time, although this isn't the greatest magic show the director did.

All about (dis)appearance

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 30 May 2016]

"Illusions fantasmagoriques" or "Fantasmagorical Illusions" or "The Famous Box Trick" is a silent black-and-white short film from the end of the 19th century. Lack of sound and color should surprise nobody looking at how this is from 1898. And if you read the French title, you will probably (hopefully) know immediately that this is another work by the very prolific and successful French filmmaking pioneer Georges Méliès. Like so many of his other works, this one here is also really short, only runs for approximately 70 seconds and shows us the master himself with a little magic performance, in which he makes children appear and lets the disappear again. I have seen some of his works and I must say this one here is not too interesting or relevant. It isn't bad and a bearable watch at such a short runtime, but really only worth checking out for huge silent film enthusiasts. Everybody else can skip it.

As always, Méliès knows how to entertain

[Tornado_Sam · 1 September 2018]

As the previous reviewer has already pointed out, Georges Méliès was a magician before he became a filmmaker. So it's no wonder that he was the one responsible to bring magic into the movies. A lot of the time, he'd do set-ups like the one here: a brief little magic act (using camera tricks) on film. Méliès's magic show movies were not always special effects based (see the chromolithographic film fragment of "Conjuring" from 1896), but oftentimes they were, and this one is no different. Using splicing of the filmstrip and himself playing the magician, Méliès performs a magic act involving a wooden box, two twin boys in clown makeup and dress, and a cardboard axe. As always, the director's joyful charm shines through in his performance on film and it is very clear this comes from his career as a stage magician.

Furthermore, tricks such as the ones shown here could not have been done on stage. No doubt conjuring the boy in the box could very well have been done live, but the gag with the axe (which I'm not going to spoil) could only have been made possible through movie magic. Indeed, Méliès would later indulge in fantasy and horror using these tricks and sometimes incorporate a plot, soon coming to the realization that cine-magic shows could easily be performed just as well and done in a more interesting way on stage than on film. But, no matter where he was in his career, he'd always sneak in a few of these little acts here and there. They may get old after a while, but they're fun anyway.