The Magic Box is a picture of great sincerity and integrity, superbly acted and intelligently directed. Biopic of William Friese-Greene, the British motion picture pioneer, is charged with real life drama.
Eric Ambler’s screenplay is taken from Ray Allister’s biography, Friese-Greene: Close-up of an Inventor. And the script pinpoints all the major triumphs and tragedies in the life of this pioneer, from his youthful beginnings as a photographer’s assistant, to his death in 1921 at a film industry meeting with only the price of a cinema ticket in his pocket.
The selection of Robert Donat as Friese-Greene is an excellent one. Always a polished performer, he brings a new depth of sincerity and understanding to the role. His two wives are portrayed with infinite charm by Maria Schell and Margaret Johnston. Schell, as the ailing girl from Switzerland, shares the inventor’s first and greatest triumph. Johnston shares only his failures.
Many front ranking stars have little more than walk-on bits, and quite a few just make a brief appearance without even dialog. Mention must be made of a fine cameo from Laurence Olivier as a policeman who is the first to see the inventor’s moving picture.
The
Monthly Film Bulletin
Published by
The British Film Institute
Volume 18, No.213, October 1951, page 342
Magic Box, The (1951)
The British film industry's chief contribution to the Festival is the co-operatively produced The Magic Box, a biography of the British pioneer of the cinema - the film claims no more than this for him - William Friese-Greene. His career followed the classic pattern of the brilliant but impractical and frustrated inventor. His first job is as assistant in a photographer's shop and through his skill in taking naturalistic portraits he soon acquires a considerable reputation and a partnership in a prosperous London business. This he throws over, however, to pursue his real interest: the invention of a camera which will take moving pictures. The financial hardships exhaust and finally kill his delicate wife, but Friese-Greene at last succeeds, and shows the first moving pictures to a bewildered city policeman. He continues to develop his invention, increasingly frustrated by the knowledge that Edison and not himself is credited as the inventor of the motion picture camera. After his first wife's death Friese-Greene marries again, but his second wife, worn out by a succession of bankruptcies and disasters, finally leaves him. He works for years on the development of colour film. In 1921, old and ill, he visits his wife to tell her that he believes he has at last succeeded. He goes on to a meeting called by the film trade and there - recognized by no one - makes a speech calling for unity; then he collapses and dies. In his pockets are a pawn ticket and enough money for a cinema seat.
The career of Friese-Greene contains few of the elements of drama; it was a record of minor and depressing failures, lightened by one brief triumph. The makers of the film, while permissibly exploiting such opportunities for sentiment as the first wife's concealment of her illness and the enlistment of his schoolboy sons in the war to save their parents the cost of supporting them, have wisely not attempted to force the dramatic note or to present their leading figures on too large or heroic a scale. Robert Donat's performance is in keeping with this moderation.
It was necessary, however, to provide the film with a climax in the invention itself, and this has clearly dictated the arrangement of Eric Ambler's script. He departs from chronology in favour of a double reminiscence: first the second wife's recollections in flashback, then Friese-Greene's own memories of the earlier period. This narrative method detracts seriously from the dramatic value of the first section of the film, which is building up to no climax; the best scenes - assisted by an attractive performance from Maria Schell-belong to the early part of Friese-Greene's life.
The style adopted by John Boulting is that of a chronicle; a leisurely, slow paced, sober view of events, with occasional ventures into near burlesque, as in the photo-graphing of a Victorian wedding group and the rehearsals of a choral society. The film, as befits the occasion, is excellently photographed (by Jack Cardiff) and handsomely mounted. The presence of sixty stars has fortunately not resulted in the building up of small parts to more than their natural size. Laurence Olivier makes the most of the film's best acting opportunity as the alarmed policeman.
Some Trivia.
It's the film that inspired Martin Scorsese.
One of the extras in this movie is a teenage Ronnie Kray (later the infamous London gangster).
Ronald Neame in his memoirs wrote that Alec Guinness was only actor to refuse a role in this.
The Magic Box was the English film industry's contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Its all-star cast generously forsook their usual salaries for the privilege of paying tribute to that unsung pioneer of cinema, William Friese-Greene, here played by Robert Donat. Adapted by Eric Ambler from the controversial biography by Ray Allister, Magic Box contends that Friese-Greene was the true father of motion pictures, and not such upstarts as W. K. L. Dickson and Thomas Edison. Told in flashback, the film details Friese-Greene's tireless experiments with the "moving image," leading inexorably to a series of failures and disappoints, as others hog the credit for the protagonist's discoveries. The huge cast includes such British film luminaries as Joyce Grenfell, Miles Malleson, Michael Redgrave, Eric Portman, Emlyn Williams, Richard Attenborough, Peter Ustinov, Cecil Parker, Kay Walsh, and, best of all, Laurence Olivier as the confused bobby who witnesses Friese-Greene's first motion picture demonstration.
<
