Watch The '?' Motorist For Free

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Robert Paul made some pretty good films, from documentary to comedy. Here, he gives the direction over to Walter Booth, who directed various other films for Paul. Clearly these two were trying to imitate Georges Melies, but here the result is actually very good. And, while it has trick effects, these effects are used for both comedic and story-telling purposes, which makes it ahead of Melies's work.A crazy, law-breaking motorist is chased by a cop for speeding. He goes up the side of a building and ends up in space, rides around Saturn's rings, and eventually plummets back to earth, landing in a courthouse. Pretty crazy and absurd, just the thing 1906 audiences were looking for. While it's easy to see how the effects are done, (such as superimposing the car onto the building when it goes up the side) that doesn't really matter as the film is still pretty entertaining and works very well. In fact, it actually would still work well enough today.

R W Paul was an influential British film maker in the early days of cinema. Sadly a lot of his output has been lost.The motorist from 1906 remains and we see the embryonic influence of early slapstick such as the policeman being run over and then chasing after car is something that will come to prominent a few years later in Hollywood silents with the likes of Charlie Chaplin.We also see here the debt to Georges Melies as there is a lot of trick photography as well as art and set direction inspired by Melies output such as a car driving in space and on the rings of Saturn.Some of the special effects are not on par with Melies but we see these short films moving on from being just point and shoot.

It's entirely likely that pioneer British filmmaker R. W. Paul - who by 1906 was a ten-year veteran of movie-making - was heavily influenced by the French trick photography wizard Georges Melies when he conceived and filmed this frantic little tale. It tells the story of the type of motorist who wouldn't be out of place on the motorways of Britain today. Our speeding anti-hero, sitting in his flashy convertible with a hot chick - with violent tendencies, it has to be said - by his side, blithely runs over a policemen before evading capture by driving up the side of a building and across a convenient carpet of clouds before crash-landing in a court room. The film is entertaining enough - although Melies would undoubtedly have done it better - but the story exists as a vehicle (no pun intended) for the trickery rather than the trickery enhancing the story.

This is an exceptional trick film from early cinema. The trick film was one of the most popular genres of the time, popularized and created by Georges Méliès. This one by Robert W. Paul and Walter R. Booth is superior to Méliès's films in the respect that it's not chained to the tableau style of storytelling that Méliès relentlessly pursued in his attempt to make film an extension of theatre. That is, instead of one complete scene followed by another, generally linked by dissolves, this film is linked by simple, continuously smoother cuts. Scenes are somewhat dissected and action moves from shot to shot in a modern continuity fashion. It also isn't confined to the stage--the cramped studio in which Méliès worked with the camera taking the position of the proscenium arch.The open space allows for the common gag of a car running over a man (replaced by a dummy), which is technically done fairly well here for the time. From there, the car and occupants drive up a building and up to the sky and, eventually, outer space. The sky and outer space bit seems characteristic of what Méliès had been doing. The final gag is also quite clever--playing with the notion of the good 'ole horse carriage as safe and the newfangled automobile as dangerous: a common theme in trick films. This is zany, fun stuff, and I can see why these "cinema of attractions" continued to coexist with the generally less entertaining story films. Apparently, having since left Paul and Paul having since left the movie business, Booth remade this in 1911 as "The Automatic Motorist".