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Our Word of the Week, sweat, has set us on a jaunt into the meaning and the value of work, and that’s suggested a film that meant a lot to the people of Great Britain at the time, and especially to actors and directors and everyone else who participated in what is at its best a high form of popular art: the motion picture. I don’t know if children still do these things, but there was a time when I was a boy that some of my friends and I took to making “flip books.” You do it by drawing a series of pictures on one page after another, with each picture very slightly different from the one before it, so that as you flip the pages very quickly, the people and the things in the pictures appear to move. The whole “movie” would take only two seconds, and for that you might have to draw 20 pictures, but you could show a guy catching a pass for a touchdown, or a dog wagging his tail and sitting up, or what have you. It was a lot of work to do it, I guess, but it didn’t feel that way, because you’d be absorbed by the fun and the challenge of it. Now then, what if you could do the same thing with photographic pictures you could project onto a screen, as with the old “magic lantern”? What if you could show people — real people in real places — in motion?
That’s the challenge brought out by our Film of the Week, The Magic Box, based on the life of William Friese-Greene (1855-1921), who was — though there is some controversy over this — the first man to patent a process of shooting pictures to be shown in quick succession and then the “magic box,” the projector, with which to show them. He turned that first projector with a hand-crank, at just the right speed to make the people he had photographed in Hyde Park to come “alive.” One of the most memorable scenes in the film is when Friese-Greene rushes out of his flat late at night to corral a local policeman walking his beat, and with something that is three parts enthusiasm, one part exhaustion, and one part mania, he brings him up there to show him what he’s accomplished. The mute and almost frozen astonishment on the policeman’s face is priceless. And you’d not guess who it was in that brief cameo: Laurence Olivier.
“You must be a very happy man, Mr. Friese-Greene,” says the policeman, and that’s ironic, because Friese-Greene, consumed with work, had led a life crowded with great successes and great failures. His was a kind of behavior which, thank God, you will find in a few men but in no more than a few; they are necessary, because otherwise the human race would never have survived the Ice Age, or if we had, we’d still be dwelling in grass huts and grubbing for roots. But the price is very high. Most of The Magic Box is presented to us in flashbacks, wherein we see, for example, Friese-Greene’s first wife, Helena (Maria Schell), telling him, with smiles and tears, that she has pawned her pearls to help him continue with his work; the family in fact did go bankrupt, and his wife separated from him. When she died, he married again, and yet all he has on him in the final scene is a pound and a few pence, an old reel of film, and some odds and ends; he is otherwise destitute, and his second wife, dying of cancer, would survive him for only a few months. He had one child with his first wife, and six with his second.
Robert Donat stars in this film as Friese-Greene, and I think that only Ronald Colman could have approached his perfection for the role. Debra and I are great admirers of Donat’s work: we’ve featured the film that was his last, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and that wonderful and wistful look at the English public school and the old headmasters, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, for which Donat deserved and won the Oscar for Best Actor. Donat himself was never in good health, and something of that frailty always shows up in his remarkably expressive face, and in his rich voice with the slightest tremor to it. He, like the very different Gary Cooper, could say more in one glance with his eyes than many actors say in a whole film. Somehow, in The Magic Box, he has to capture our sympathy, even though his life, in a human sense, has been a ruin. In fact, the film begins with what will be his last scene, when he, an old man nobody knows anymore, shows up before a large group of squabbling businessmen in the British film industry in 1921, and he pleads with them to tend to the art, not to destroy it by crass desire for profit alone, and to “grow up.” It’s not flippant, not angry — it is an old man’s plea. That is really what did happen, and William Friese-Greene, overcome with emotion — well, I will not tell you the result.
Everybody who was anybody in British acting wanted to be in this one, if but for a moment or two, so ardently did they want to give credit to their countrymen for his inventions and his courage. For film buffs, that’s going to be part of the fun: catching Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Richard Attenborough, Ronald Culver (the rakish Duke of Omnium, for you fans of The Pallisers), Bernard Miles (Joe Gargery in Great Expectations), Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford (Miss Marple, for you Agatha Christie fans), Leo Genn (Petronius, in Quo Vadis?), and many, many more. It was a nice way to say to a man unappreciated in his time, “Well done, lad, well done.”
Click on the photo above to watch “The Magic Box” on Internet Archive.
I’m looking forward to watching this movie with Robert Donat, which I’ve never heard of before. But we have two favorite Robert Donat movies : “Tartu,” and “The 39 Steps,” both of which we recorded many years ago with our VCR! We’ve watched each of them countless times!
British films are difficult to surpass, and this one is an absolute gem!