Satan in Prison

The film resembles a magic stage-show as the prisoner (Méliès) slowly converts his Spartan cell into a comfortable and well-provisioned drawing room, and then conjures up a lovely luncheon companion. A guard arrives, prompting the prisoner to revert his luxurious room to the empty space before revealing his true self to the shocked turn-keys. Slapstick fun with lots of well-done early 'special effects'.

This one is on the quirky side - very odd indeed! There are a lot of camera tricks in this film - some quite good for the time era. Melies plays Satan in this one - imprisoned and turns his room into a very nice home. In the end, he leaves the police scratching their heads. Very cute and comical.

9.5/10

One could say it would be a mistake to put Satan in jail. I wonder what he did. Of course, his cell is stark, so he uses his magic to spruce it up. He puts paintings on the walls, creates a table with a white tablecloth, and decides to dine with a young woman. The fun is the clean way that things come into being at his behest. He is manic from the beginning. His smugness is interesting. Why would Satan allow himself to be imprisoned in the first place.

Satan en prison (1907)

*** (out of 4)

aka Satan in Prison

George Melies loved certain subjects and if you go through his filmmography you're going to run across certain stories that the French director did several times. This is one example and is another remake of his film THE HAUNTED CASTLE. This time out, Satan himself winds up in prison where he's put into an empty cell and before long he begins to add pieces such as a table, chairs and eventually a woman. Melies liked making films like this one where he'd simply use his magic to build up a set. He did this type of film quite a bit throughout his career and while this one here takes a while to get started once it does hit its stride it makes for a pretty good entertainment. As in the previous films, the special effects are certainly the highlights and while the trick shots are obviously done through editing, I think the quality had certainly improved by this point in the director's career. The edits were quite simple and not nearly as noticeable as they had been a decade earlier. As usual, Melies brings a lot of charm to the main character and helps get a few nice laughs.

Some flics throw an elegantly dressed man into an empty prison cell. He proceeds to pull out all the furnishings needed to provide him some creature comforts, including a handsome young lady. How it all turns out.... well, the title tells it all.

Here we have a fairly late version of Melies' single most imitated film, THE HAUNTED CASTLE, which he remade a dozen times. As always, the piece is a matter of pure magic, both of the stage and film variety, although it is mostly the film variety in this version, enhanced the stage presence he developed in his years as a magician and manager-owner of the Theatre Robert-Houdin, founded by probably the most famous stage magician of the 19th Century, so well-known that Houdini chose a close variant for his stage name.

And even though the title gives it away, it's always a pleasure to watch Melies do this sort of film.