THE MAGIC BOX (1951)

A partial list: Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier, Margaret Rutherford, Peter Ustinov, Herbert Lom, Michael Redgrave, Stanley Holloway, Richard Attenborough, Glynis Johns, Dennis Price, Michael Hordern, Cecil Parker, Kay Walsh . . .  Just about every known actor in Britain at the time wanted to be in this bio-pic of U.K. film pioneer William Friese-Greene.  And just about no one wanted to go see it.  A famous flop on release, one of those films that shows up in shorter cuts in hopes of getting back some of the costs (original length 118"), it never has shed its poor rep.  Yet it’s actually quite a nice bit of filmmaking.  Intriguing non-linear structure by Eric Ambler* (starts near the end; flashback to the middle with wife #2; jump ahead for more of the ending; then skip all the way back to early days and wife #1 before wrapping up the last act), handsomely produced (Ronald Neame), well paced (director John Boulting), and ingeniously lensed (Jack Cardiff with TechniColor & seamless trick photography).   Part of the 1951 Festival of Britain, a nationwide cultural event meant to signify the beginning of the end of post-war austerity measures, the appropriately patriotic subject on one of the long forgotten inventors of moving pictures.  (Many countries headed in the same cinematic direction around the same time.)  Here, it’s Friese-Greene, played by Donat as a slightly absent-minded optimist with celluloid in his veins.  A pageant drama, it’s tableaux consistently pleasant, if never riveting.  But enough episodes land to carry you along with it.  The most famous one (Olivier’s night cop called in to witness the first film ever projected) worth the whole film.  Maria Schell as the frail, sacrificing first wife is a bit much (Luise Rainer in her tremulous heyday had nothing on Schell), but the rest of the cast are pretty swell.  And if Donat looks far too ravaged by illness to be believably twenty, he’s sympathetic as ever.  Almost shockingly believable in his death.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Ambler largely pulls off the non-linear narrative design Preston Sturges had trouble getting Paramount to leave alone on his failed inventor bio-pic: THE GREAT MOMENT/’44.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The ‘Everybody Who’s Anybody’ cast just what W. S. Gilbert had in mind on this lyric from The Gondoliers: ‘In short, whoever you may be; To this conclusion you'll agree; When every one is somebody; Then no one's anybody!’  (Maybe that’s why the film tanked.)