 |
| Director: Edwin S. Porter Starring: Jack Brawn Length: 5:20 minutes |
Ha ha, I was not
expecting this one. I figured that I
should have more than one Edwin S. Porter movie on my list, since he’s hailed
as such an important early filmmaker, but after the borefest that was “The
Great Train Robbery”, I wasn’t expecting very much that would entertain from “Dream
of a Rarebit Fiend”. Even the title
sounds dull and opaque: the hell is a
rarebit? How does one become a fiend
thereof? This movie’s probably going to
suck!, proclaimed I in my ignorance.
Instead, what I got was a psychedelic nightmare ride with some hilarious
imagery and interesting special effects.
“Dream” opens with the unnamed protagonist, at a diner, gorging himself
on rarebit and beer. Rarebit, by the
way, is apparently the name of a Welsh dish made from cheese and toast (and zero
rabbit). Thoroughly wasted and stuffed,
the protagonist staggers home in what is actually a pretty interesting
scene. There are two shots overlaid on
each other—one is a POV shot of the camera reeling around tipsily, the other is
of the drunk desperately clinging onto a street lamp post which in his
disorientation seems to swing to and fro like a massive pendulum:
Once home, he goes
to bed, but his ordeal doesn’t end there.
He has a delirious nightmare in which little imps crawl out of a pot
like the one he was eating out of, and prods his throbbing head with tiny
pitchforks. Then, his bed starts jumping
around like an enraged bull, and leaps out of the window with the man clinging
for dear life. The shot is, I would
guess, done with stop-motion, and the effect is pulled off well. I was not expecting it, and it made me laugh. The bed flies through the night sky over the
city, as the man pilots it as though it were a motorcar (or one of those newfangled
flying aero-mobiles).
The dream ends with
the man crashing through the roof of his house and landing back in bed, where
he wakes to find his room as he left it:
no hole in the ceiling, no shattered window, and absolutely zero pieces
of furniture possessed by Satan.
“Dream of a Rarebit
Fiend” is based on a series of comic strips which all have the same plot: a man eats too much rarebit, has a dream
where craaaazy stuff happens, and wakes up, regretting haven eaten so much
rarebit. However, the film version makes
it pretty clear that it was the copious amounts of alcohol—not the rarebit—that was the cause of the protagonist’s
disorientation and delirium. I’m not
even sure how just eating rarebit would give you nightmares anyway—it’s just
cheese and toast. If any of you have
ever eaten Welsh rarebit, and know it to have psychotropic properties, then
please do tell me.
No comments:
Post a Comment