The Fat and the Lean Wrestling Match (1901) User Reviews

Honest chuckles.

[Kitahito · 8/10 · 27 March 2021]

I watched this Méliès short movie with sheer devotion. You don't need to "change lenses" to fully enjoy this one, because the humor of it is timeless, and the action is still very much enjoyable. A high quality, cartoonish comedic experience, very entertaining and surprisingly violent. Gotta love it! Round 2... Fight!

Fat and Lean Wrestling Match is Melies' cartoonish version of wrestling

[tavm · 8/10 · 28 August 2006]

We see two women covering themselves with blankets. When they uncover themselves, they are now two men. These two men start to wrestle. One of them manages to throw the other around. The other one then literally knocks his head off as well as his arms, legs, and feet! He then puts the dismembered parts together when he places the body together on the bench. The women come back to take the men away from the screen. Two different men appear who are much bigger. The bigger of the big manages to flatten the other one like a pancake. After the flattened one comes back to normal, he throws the other one up before that other one lands back on him! They wrestle a little before the less heavy of the big men manages to pin him down and jump on him, causing his arms, legs, and head to disassemble on impact! After he leaves, the disassembled man assembles and walks out of screen. The end. It is here that Georges Melies takes a popular fairground sport and gives it a cartoonish feel on film. It certainly should be fascinating to today's wrestling fans who think wrestling was invented only recently!

Wrestle mania

[Red-Barracuda · 6/10 · 26 March 2012]

In this film, master cinematic experimenter Georges Méliès uses his celebrated trickery to depict a wrestling match. The effect is like a live action cartoon. Except that this is 1901 and animated cartoons hadn't even been invented yet! In other words it's quite original. And it's really still quite amusing too. Méliès fills its short running time with a barrow load of comic invention. We have women morphing into men; a man having his head and limbs knocked off and reassembled; and a fellow who is flattened like a pancake. What this movie shows, apart from Méliès mastery of visual trickery, is his sense of humour and comic timing. Some comedy shows from a few years ago are no longer amusing, so it's really quite impressive that this feature from over one hundred years ago still manages to raise a few smiles.

Funny & Imaginative

[Snow Leopard · 19 September 2005]

This funny and imaginative Georges Méliès comedy plays off of the popularity of fairgrounds-style wrestling, adding some humorous touches and a good assortment of the kind of special camera effects for which Méliès is so well-remembered. As with so many of his features, he manages to squeeze a lot of material out of a simple premise.

As the movie begins, the wrestlers are two women, but they are only the prelude. The 'main event' features two men wrestling, with some moves and mishaps that you could normally only see in a cartoon. It bears watching closely to notice all of the visual effects that Méliès slipped in, because they go past pretty quickly at times.

The camera tricks are quite good for 1900, and show both skill and imagination, in the ideas and in carrying them off. There are only a small handful of times when the illusion does not quite come off, and most of it still holds up pretty well even now.

This one made me chuckle!

[planktonrules · 10/10 · 8 September 2020]

"Nouvelles luttes extravagantes" is one of film pioneer Georges Méliès' funniest films....and I found myself chuckling several times as I watched it. For such an early film, it was very well done and holds up pretty well today.

When the story begins, two women enter the picture. Their clothes instantly change before your eyes. Then, the instantly change into guys who wrestle. The match itself is INSANE...with one wrestler ripping the head and limbs off the other...and then they magically return. Later, two other wrestlers appear...one very large, the other skinny. What happens next REALLY made me laugh.

If you aren't familiar with Georges Méliès, he was a stage magician who became a filmmaker in 1896. He specialized in making films where magical stuff occurs due to various camera tricks he pioneered. Most are things that are very obvious today...but back in the day, they made audiences marvel. Most of the tricks in this particular film were done by stopping the camera, making a change and then restarting the camera to make it appear as if something has disappeared or changed. Pretty simple stuff but also quite clever and fun. My score of 10 is relative to other films of the day.

This is Genuinely Funny

[Hitchcoc · 9/10 · 11 November 2017]

Most of the time when I view these pioneering efforts, I comment on how much one could do with so little. The plots are thin, but after all, it's 1900. This little wrestling bit is one of the best I've seen and I actually giggled as I watched it. It is especially engaging when the skinny guy (Melies himself) goes against the much bigger man. What transpires is ingenious, with some masterful animation. I especially enjoyed when the big guy flattens Melies and peels him off the floor. Great fun.

one of the first comedies ever made, and more impressive than can be anticipated by most

[framptonhollis · 5/10 · 27 July 2017]

At the very, very beginning of cinema, cinemagician Georges Melies refused to be caught between the boundaries of limit. Despite lack of cinematic technique at the time, Melies worked hard to crate what his imagination desired, and thus, film as an art form significantly developed in the process. This early action-comedy hybrid is a wacky, cartoonish depiction of a manic wrestling match made all the more insane by the constant disappearing, reappearing, morphing, etc. of the wrestlers. Men are torn apart and put back together, they are surrealistically flattened, and keep switching back and forth from being women. it's a ridiculous little movie, and hugely imaginative and impressive for its time, particularly in a visual sense. I was legitimately wow-ed by this film's special effects, even more so than with Melies' other movies. Remember: this movie was made back in 1901, well over 100 years ago, and yet it still is jam packed with some of the most magical cinematic tricks of all time 9not to mention, much of it is still also genuinely funny).

Fat and Lean Wrestling Match

[Michael_Elliott · 28 March 2008]

Fat And Lean Wrestling Match (1900)

*** (out of 4)

aka Nouvelles luttes extravagantes

This here is one of the director's most loved films. The film starts off with a fat woman and a lean woman wrestling but then they morph into a fat man and a lean man (played by Melies). This film is highly enjoyable from start to finish and contains some pretty good special effects. The highlight of the film is a hilarious sequence where one of the men gets decapitated and then ripped to shreds before being brought back to life again. The silly, child like humor throughout this short makes it one of the director's most loved films.

Women and warriors

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 20 July 2015]

"The Fat and the Lean Wrestling Match" is a Georges Méliès short film that tells us a but about gender roles around 1900, 115 years ago. Very early, we see two women in fancy dresses and they reappear in this almost 2-minute-long short film, but most of the time we see two men wrestling. But it's more than that. Méliès uses trick photography again to create 3 funny and awkward situations where obviously one of the fighters was a doll used for that particular moment. All in all, it's a solid Méliès film, not among his best. Obviously, this is still black-and-white and silent, even if there are versions out there where people used soundtracks. Not that great too watch though except the scenes where the master used the trick photography I mentioned before.