Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

thejcowboy22 For the first time in my life I was recently married, 23 and unemployed. My wife was working and I was home watching TV. A British movie came on, The Magic Box which caught my interest immediately . The frustrating life of film innovator William Freese Greene (Robert Donat). The real inventor of color motion pictures. Yes there will be debates that will go on for a time about who invented the motion picture projector and who put in the patents first. But the 100 percent perspiration and dedication of one man shines throughout this movie. Despite bouts with money and marriage problems our inventor chap continued to persevere in his quest for a beautiful finished product. Earlier I watched the original Good Bye Mister Chips starring Robert Donat in the lead. What paralleled these two pictures was the similarity of Robert Donat playing different ages throughout the picture. As in the film Mister Chips you see Donat as a young Freshman Professor at a boarding school and as the film wears on he ages well into his early eighties. In this movie Donat starts as an elderly man at a London conference and the film flashes back showing a younger spry apprentice photographer. Our movie starts with the fore mentioned conference with the older Greene speaking to fellow businessmen in the film industry. Greene's stands up frustrated as he wants to make his message about the innovations of filming but the crowd was saturated with money hungry businessmen interested in complacency. Silent black and white movies being the norm rather than technical advances stressed by Greene. The response from his peers was complacent at the very least. Greene sits himself down and ponders his past. Greene's story flashed back in time as a young studio portrait photographer for a man called Maurice Guttenberg (Frederick Valk). Guttenberg and Greene have a falling out. Greene insists on shooting a picture his way. Greene and his new bride venture out on their own. Green opens his own photography business and slowly makes a solid customer base. With the money and the help of businessman, he invests it all on developing a color film with quite a few failures along the way but persistence pays off as he finally develops a celluloid that could handle a movie projector. One night Greene sets up his makeshift projector. Greene is excited about a scene he filmed in Hyde Park earlier in the day. Greene is about to run the film but there's no audience. He calls down to the street where a Bobby is walking his beat.The Bobby is played by the exemplary Actor Sir Laurence Olivier. Greene tells the befuddled Officer to sit and watch the bed sheet on the wall. Greene runs the film to the amazement of the confused constable as he runs to the sheet and tries to grab the images. This movie has so many cameos of Iconic British cinema actors. Here are some familiars, Leo Genn, David Tomlinson, Peter Ustinov and Michael Redgrave. I always like the acting of Robert Donat and his soft spoken approach. When this movie was released it was a box office flop but to me it was informative and poignant.

GusF Released to commemorate the Festival of Britain, this is a fairly entertaining, if heavily fictionalised and romanticised, account of the British cinematography pioneer William Friese-Greene, who is nowhere near as well remembered as his more successful contemporaries Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers and the true inventor of cinematography Louis Le Prince. Rather appropriately given the subject, the film has beautiful colour cinematography and it is well directed by John Boulting but the script is not as strong as it could be as it is not very well paced. I did not really see the point in telling the film out of chronological order. It begins with his second wife Edith recounting their troubled marriage before the elderly Friese-Greene recollects his early career and his life with his more supportive first wife Helena.The always effortlessly charming and charismatic Robert Donat is excellent in the role of Friese-Greene, a good and well-meaning man whose obsession with perfecting moving pictures leads him to neglect his family though not out of any malice. His performance is without a doubt the highlight of the film. After him, the strongest cast member is Maria Schell as Helena. Margaret Johnston is quite good as Edith in her more sedate scenes but goes badly over the top during the character's emotional breakdown. The film is notable for featuring many great British actors in cameo roles: Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Michael Hordern, Michael Denison, Michael Redgrave, Thora Hird, William Hartnell, Sid James, Joyce Grenfell, Marius Goring, Stanley Holloway, Kay Walsh, Joan Hickson, Glynis Johns, Miles Malleson, etc. I was very glad to finally see Attenborough's wife Sheila Sim in a film, having seen her husband and her brother Gerald in so many recently! Many of the actors in the film later turned up in films that Attenborough directed, incidentally.The best scene in the film is the very funny one in which Friese-Greene tells a policeman, played by Olivier in probably the most normal, down-to-earth role of his very long and impressive career, that he has invented the motion picture but the way that he phrases it makes it sound as if he had committed a murder! The final scene in which Friese-Greene dies unrecognised and forgotten at a film conference is quite moving.Overall, this is a decent film but not a great one. If you want to watch a film about the 19th Century pioneer of a technology which we now take for granted, I would recommend the considerably better (and more historically accurate but still fictionalised) "The Story of Alexander Graham Bell" starring Don Ameche.

l_rawjalaurence Much has been said in other reviews about the subject of John Boulting's biopic, the inventor William Friese-Greene, who spent his life trying to create the eponymous "magic box" that would show moving pictures. Whether he was the first to do so is largely insignificant: the fact that he went largely unrecognized assumes far greater importance.Planned to celebrate the Festival of Britain in 1951, THE MAGIC BOX recognizes the achievements of someone who spent just about everything - time, money and effort - on his work. Director Boulting alternates between scenes in Friese Greene's (Robert Donat's) laboratory, with domestic sequences involving his wives Edith (Margaret Johnston) and Helena (Maria Schell). Although a devoted husband, Friese-Greene is so obsessed with his work that he neglects his family; as shown in several sequences where he begins to talk excitedly about his discoveries, while remaining oblivious to his wives' complaints. In one sequence, for example, Edith has to remind him that he has missed an important concert at which he was supposed to be the soloist; to avoid any embarrassment with the conductor (Muir Matheson), she had to fill in for him. Sometimes his wives sacrifice their own health to support him; Helena is shown in close-up crumpling a medicinal prescription in her hand as she travels home by coach. In her view it's far more important to encourage Friese-Greene's work than to cure her congenital heart condition.Boulting adopts an equivocal view of Friese-Greene's work; although obviously an innovator, his obsessions caused pain and suffering in his family, and led to the break-up of profitable partnerships such as that with rich northern business person Arthur Collings (Eric Portman), which could have secured Friese-Greene's financial future.The film is structured in double flashback, showing us how Friese- Greene's life, and enabling Donat to give a virtuoso performance in the title role. This most underrated of British actors was particularly good at portraying tortured souls (remember GOODBYE MR. CHIPS (1939)), and he manages to communicate the pain lurking at the heart of Friese-Greene's soul, once he realizes the damage he has done to his family. Boulting is fond of using the quick close-up to register his emotions.As well as being a celebration of the inventor, THE MAGIC BOX celebrates the British film industry by offering roles to virtually all the major stars (and supporting actors) working in the studios at that time. The film offers fans the pleasure of identifying people in the smallest roles, and enjoying scene-stealing cameos such as Margaret Ruthferford's irascible dowager telling Friese- Greene's first employer Guttenberg (Frederick Valk) off; Joyce Grenfell at her toothiest as a member of Edith's choral society; Sidney James and William Hartnell as a pair of World War One army personnel; and Laurence Olivier in his famous cameo as a London police officer marveling at Friese-Greene's invention.Thematically speaking, Eric Ambler's script might be a familiar one, but that does not prevent viewers from enjoying the film as a celebration of a long-forgotten figure as well as British films as a whole.

falon The most enjoyable and very emotional scene was when Robert Donat (Wm. Friese-Greene) finally succeeds in producing moving images on a sheet he's hung in his studio...he runs like a madman into the street in the middle of the night desperate to find someone to witness this miracle. Who does he find? Sir Laurence Olivier..a Police Constable . Donat ushers him into his lab, sits him down and proceeds to ramble on about what he's invented. Sir Laurence, the ever vigilant and cautious policeman thinks he's some kind of nut and slowly reaches for his night stick..that's when Robert Donat flicks on the first moving pictures of Hyde Park...Olivier is flabergasted..gets up moves to the sheet and looks behind it.."That's Hyde Park!' After rambling some more Robert Donat breaks into tears..finally explaining what he has accomplished..Olivier replies "You must be a very happy man"..a terrific scene and one I'll never forget. A cameo appearance by Lord Olivier and a very memorable scene.