Santa Claus (1898)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Sadly Over-hyped

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Blistering performances.

You can't call this early Smith films' special effects outstanding for the time period, considering that exact same year Georges Melies made a film called "The Four Troublesome Heads" which has even more creative camera tricks. In terms of plot, however, this is pretty sophisticated considering most films at the time were plot-less and merely documented everyday life. In fact, considering its Christmas-y theme, you could call this the first holiday movie. I can imagine children being delighted back in 1898, and it's still a charming little gem even now.Some children want to stay up on Christmas Eve but a maid tucks them into bed. By the clever use of a matte shot, we see Santa go down the chimney. He then enters the room and fills the children's stockings, disappears, and the children wake up. That's all there is in this movie but you have to admit for 1898 it's really quite good compared to other movies of the era.

British short film made near the end of the 19th century. Which is very cool to me, by the way, watching something made before my great-grandparents were born. It's a little over a minute long and basically just shows Santa Claus visiting a house on Christmas Eve. Interesting for historical reasons, both for film history and Christmas/Santa history. It's hard to rate a thing like this. For the most part, when I rate a movie or short or TV show, I tend to rate it on a technical level compared to similar pieces of its time or before. I also consider historical importance but ultimately entertainment value trumps all for me. This entertained me as much as a minute and change short from 1898 possibly could, and it has some technical prowess for the time on display. So that's where I'm coming from rating this as high as I did. Others will rate it higher but I just couldn't and I felt like rating it lower would be unfair.

Santa Claus (1898) *** (out of 4) This early British film is one of the first to show Santa Claus. The film is pretty simple as a couple kids want to stay up to see Santa but their mom makes them go to bed. We then see how Santa gets into their room without waking them up. This film runs 75-seconds so naturally one shouldn't expect a full story but it's interesting to note that they were at least trying to tell something and this is a full five years before THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY. What's interesting when viewing this film today is the look of Santa as they have him a lot thinner than we are use to see and he's also wearing more of a robe than an actual suit. The special effects used in the film are certainly primitive if you compare them to the stuff of today but for 1898 they're actually pretty good. I thought the effect of the mother turning the light off was something incredibly simple but the visual of it was terrific.

This interesting look at a vision of Santa Claus from the late nineteenth century is notable for a number of reasons. First is obviously its age. I think it's the first piece of movie-making from the nineteenth century that I've ever seen, and the quality and clarity was quite surprising, given that age. There's some decent enough use of special effects (extremely primitive by today's standards, but surprisingly effective when placed in their historical context.) The image of Santa Claus gives us a bit of a picture of how the jolly old man has evolved over the years. In this vignette, he has the traditional white beard but his clothing appears to be more of a robe than a suit, and he's very thin compared to the image of Santa we have today. In a little over a minute, filmmaker G.A. Smith was able to tell us the story of a Christmas Eve when two young children are put to bed. It seems to me that the first appearance of Santa is meant to be a dream that the children are having, as Santa appears hovering over them in the corner of the screen. As the children dream of Santa, he then comes through the darkness and into their bedroom to leave them with candy. It's really a delightful little film, fascinating from a historical point of view. I find it difficult to rate, because I really have nothing to compare it to from that era, but I'd say somewhere around 8/10 seems right.