An Adventurous Automobile Trip
About An Adventurous Automobile Trip
King Leopold II, played by Harry Fragson, is on holiday in Paris and is told a car can make Monte Carlo in two hours instead of the seventeen-hour train. The car leaps between Alpine peaks, knocks over a postman, hits an official at the Dijon gate so hard the man explodes, overturns a fruit stand, goes through a greenhouse, and strikes a tar wagon that blows up. It reaches the Monte Carlo grandstand, somersaults up the steps, and crashes. The king and the chauffeur are unhurt.
Cast & crew
More about An Adventurous Automobile Trip
Méliès directed, wrote, and produced it with stage director Victor de Cottens as a Folies Bergère turn: a live prologue and epilogue around the film. That version opened on 31 December 1904 and played more than 300 times over six months. Star Film then sold a standalone picture in 1905, numbers 740–749, at 200 meters (660 feet).
Themes
Background
A 1904 spoof of King Leopold II's motoring, built first as a cabaret number and only later as a catalogue film.
Making
The Folies Bergère act mixed a stage frame with the filmed ride. After the revue, Méliès cut the picture loose as a film on its own.
Technique
The ride is a chain of trick crashes: a car jumping peaks, a man exploding, a tar wagon going up.
Preservation
Pieces of at least three prints survive: a complete nitrate, with the car sometimes painted red, given to Madeleine Malthête-Méliès by an American collector; an incomplete hand-colored nitrate she bought from a Belgian collector; and fragments at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Notes
- Méliès himself is the postman who is knocked down and the octroi official who explodes.
- De Cottens appears as himself outside the Paris Opera.
- The New York branch sold it in America. In the summer of 1905 Klaw & Erlanger showed it at the Aerial Gardens, on the roof of the New Amsterdam Theatre, in black-and-white and hand-colored prints.
- Wikidata lists a running time of 10 minutes. The Wikipedia timing of the 660-foot version is 12 to 13 minutes.
Scenes
- The car knocks the postman flat and the Dijon official explodes.
- It somersaults up the grandstand steps at Monte Carlo and crashes, with both riders unhurt.
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Le Raid Paris–Monte Carlo en deux heures (1905).webm)
