You know how some films or television programmes have a humorous interlude featuring ancient newsreel footage of various contraptions collapsing the minute they are tried out? How about a whole film of such footage? Of course, not all the inventions seen here end in disaster, some are fairly effective even if they are a little ridiculous and didn't catch on. But history is littered with ambitions that never really took off, and mixed in with these men and women are scenes of people whose talents might have been better off demonstrated in a circus...
Howard Smith was the man bringing all these clips together, and after his documentary on Marjoe Gortner (which he co-directed) this was certainly a change of direction. Many of the newsreels were so old that they had either been shot without sound or the sound had been lost, so Smith had lipreaders work out what was being said and then hired actors to dub over their lines, a technique that is quite effective even if the lipsynching isn't as convincing in places as it might have been.
It's the spectacle that really keeps you watching, as the participants either risk life and limb or come up with something so absurd you worry for their mental state. Among the stunts are those who feel the need to climb up things, and a good five minutes of a short (about an hour and a quarter) film is given over to performers at dizzying height offering such daredevil behaviour as walking over scaffolding blindfolded, sliding between buildings using teeth and a rope or getting up onto a vertiginous level and, erm, smashing a plank over one's head.
Some of the other stunts include people eating nails (that's iron nails, not fingernails), having concrete blocks smashed over their chests, blowing up a balloon with one's ear (and what a huge ear it is, as is its companion) and incredibly, a man who swallows a gallon of water, then a can of kerosene, then lights a fire by spitting out the kerosene, then puts out the fire by spitting the water out after it. That's not to mention the acrobatic mailman - with every minute there is a new novelty, a fresh example of extreme eccentricity that someone is pleased to show off to the world.
Quite a lot of the inventions involve transport, whether they be trains designed to run over each other to remove the need for a separate track, or ways of speeding up simple walking. You might have thought rollerskates were the be all and end all of such notions, but you're reckoning without the ingenuity of bicycle owners. Bikes form the basis of a lot of them, with the most enterprising a man who has created a bicycle that climbs up walls and trees, doubles as a boat, and triples as a tent. Then there's flight; man's obsession with conquering the skies is well covered here, almost all ending in failure. Some of this is very funny, but by the end the film has grown strangely poignant, as if it has found an odd nobility in mankind's reach exceeding their grasp.
Display comments