This is simply idiotic. A spartan female teacher is brought in to teach French gendarmes English. Apparently, they have had a lesson before, because she immediately puts a kind of dunce hat on a guy after looking at his paper. What transpires is beyond explanation. The guys keep standing up and sitting down, over and over. I don't know what sort of learning is going. When it comes to conversation, they bring in a group of women in long dresses. I suppose they are English and are supposed to help with learning the language. They dance and act goofy with no point to anything. I could go on. Suffice it to say, this is hardly worth anyone's time. Melies was really groping for ideas at this point and seems to have lost his edge.
2 Reviews
A Sad Film from a Great Artist
Michael_Elliott20 August 2012
French Cops Learning English (1908)
* (out of 4)
aka French interpreter policeman
If you come across anything I've written in regards to Georges Melies, if you check out the films from 1908, you'll see that I'm pretty hard on them because htey clearly show that time had simply passed up the great man. Throughout the films on Flicker Alley's boxset, there's no question that starting in 1908 the films got pretty bad and this here is clearly the worst so far. The seven-minute film takes place inside a classroom where some cops are learning English. Now, the confusing part is what Melies was trying to do with this thing. I"m going to guess it was meant to be a comedy but there wasn't a single laugh here and I really can't identify anything that was even trying to be funny. This entire film is just a complete boring mess from start to finish and it's somewhat sad to watch and especially when you consider what Melies would be doing in the later part of his life, the hard times he hit and so on.
* (out of 4)
aka French interpreter policeman
If you come across anything I've written in regards to Georges Melies, if you check out the films from 1908, you'll see that I'm pretty hard on them because htey clearly show that time had simply passed up the great man. Throughout the films on Flicker Alley's boxset, there's no question that starting in 1908 the films got pretty bad and this here is clearly the worst so far. The seven-minute film takes place inside a classroom where some cops are learning English. Now, the confusing part is what Melies was trying to do with this thing. I"m going to guess it was meant to be a comedy but there wasn't a single laugh here and I really can't identify anything that was even trying to be funny. This entire film is just a complete boring mess from start to finish and it's somewhat sad to watch and especially when you consider what Melies would be doing in the later part of his life, the hard times he hit and so on.
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