The Fugitive Futurist (1924)

best movie i've ever seen.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Superb, witty and imaginative use of cinema trickery by one of the British (at least British by adoption) experts in the genre, Gaston Quiribet (the other at the rival Urban Trading being the US-born Walter R. Booth).The trick film (dying as a genre in itself by this time) was permutating interestingly in several directions. It had already by this time produced the animated film and the films of prehistoric fact or fantasy, all manner of disaster films as well as contributing importantly to the development of the US comic short. Science fiction fantasy had made some early sporadic appearancs (Mélès' Voyag dans la lune in 1902, Booth's Airship Destroyer of 1908, La Police en l'an 2000 in 1910, Homunculus in 1915, the Swedish space-travel feature, Himmelskibet, in 1918, but the pace would quicken in the twenties with the German film Algol 1920, L'Uomo meccanico 1921, Aelita (this same year, The Death Ray and Paris qui Dort (1925), Metropolis (1927) and Frau in Mond and High Treason (1929).Interfering with time had already been used in comedy (notably in Jean Durand's Onésime Horloger 1912) and would be used again by Clair in Pari qui dort but this 1924 short is the first I know of to use the idea of time-travel to present a dystopic view of the future (even if, with some inevitability, all is not quite as it appears). - Trafalgar Square flooded, the Strand up for sale or rent, The Houses of Parliament an airship terminal and Tower Bridge the site of an elaborate railway system. The weakness of the vision provided by the time-machine is that it is not really consistent but it is all quite neatly done and when the machine appears to reveal the winner of a horserace, we begin, like the man listening, to believe that perhaps.......If after all there is no such box of illusions, what is it we are watching?

Trafalgar Square awash and trains running through Tower Bridge? Clearly an early suspicion of climate change! But what kind of cracked mind could come up with the idea of using the Houses of Parliament as an airship terminal..? The slender plot of this short comedy is basically just an excuse for trick photography: the eponymous inventor claims to have created a machine which can see into the future, providing opportunities for a number of 'then and now' shots. Finally events catch up with him, and the story reverts to a more slapstick level.The special effects aren't particularly sophisticated, but the poor quality of the print helps cover up for this. Undemandingly amusing, and doesn't outstay its welcome.