The Merry Frolics of Satan
About The Merry Frolics of Satan
English engineer William Crackford is offered a high-speed trip around the world by the alchemist Alcofrisbas. He signs without reading and sells his soul. Alcofrisbas is Mephistopheles. A magic pill turns trunks into a toy train that carries Crackford, his servant John, and the family out of the city. The train and the family are lost at a bridge. At an inn the disguised devil ruins their meal with apes and demons. The carriage becomes a star-drawn vehicle, is driven into an eruption of Vesuvius, flies past planets, hits a thunderstorm, and crashes through a dining-room ceiling. Mephistopheles takes Crackford to the underworld, where demons turn him on a spit.
Cast & crew
More about The Merry Frolics of Satan
Georges Méliès directed, wrote, produced, and played Mephistopheles. Star Film catalogue numbers are 849–870. The length is 323 meters, or 1,050 feet, timed at 17 minutes. He drew on the 1839 féerie Les Pilules du diable and on Les Quatre Cents Coups du diable (1905), for which he had staged two sequences, "Le Voyage dans l'espace" and "Le Cyclone," and reused them here. The French title is Les Quat'Cents Farces du diable.
Themes
Making
Méliès supervised the design and the trick work himself, including substitution splices and multiple exposures, at a time when French production was already organized as mass output.
Look
Stage traps, pyrotechnics, and substitution splices carry the transformations. Some release prints were hand-colored in part.
Technique
The flying carriage, the model Vesuvius, and the spit in hell are stage machines and trick splices, not location spectacle.
Preservation
Prints survive. David Shepard's 2008 home-video restoration includes hand-colored fragments.
Notes
- Outdoor scenes were shot in Méliès's garden at Montreuil-sous-Bois. The rest is studio stage machinery: traps, rolling backdrops, and a model volcano kept from The Eruption of Mount Pelee (1902).
- A print was partly hand-colored.
- David Shepard's restoration, using hand-colored fragments, came out on home video in 2008.
Scenes
- Crackford signs the unread contract, and Alcofrisbas shows himself as Mephistopheles.
- The carriage is flung through the eruption and past the planets.
- Demons roast Crackford on a spit.
Influenced by
- Les Pilules du diable (1839)
- Les Quatre Cents Coups du diable (1905)
- the Faust legend
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Les Quat'Cents Farces du diable (Georges Méliès, 1906).webm)
