Disturbing yet enthralling

Boring

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

NOT the first film of 1894, despite previous reviewer's claim. The first Edison to be filmed for the purpose of commercial release was probably "Sandow", shot March 6, 1894, and first exhibited publicly on April 14 along with nine others. IMDb gives the release date for "Chinese Laundry" as May, 1894. The film notes that accompany the documentary "Edison, the Invention of the Movies", give the shooting date as November 26, 1894. At any rate, "Chinese Laundry" was definitely not the "first film".

1894 FIRST FILM Chinese Laundry (or the Pursuit of Hop Lee by an irate policeman). (1894). Edison Kinetoscope Film. Directors: William K.L. Dickson, William Heise. Cast: Robetta, Doretto.The title appears in the Maguire and Baucus catalog of 1897, where it is described as the "Pursuit of Hop Lee by an irate policeman", an old vaudeville act. Maguire and Baucus were the London agents for the Kinetoscope. While "Chinese Laundry" is their first silent film, William Heise first filmed/Takes/Shots include "Monkey Shines, No. 1 in 1890 and William K.L. Dickson's "Newark Athlete" in 1891.Reference: Iris Barry, Eileen Bowser, Gary Carey, Alistair Cooke, Richard Griffith, Arthur Knight, & Donald Richie. (n. d.). Silent Films. NY: Museum of Modern Art and the United States Information Agency.

. . . and the people Edison was filming were supposed to be the vaudeville hotshots of their day. So either these guys got stage fright, or their schtick did not translate to the new medium of the movies. The historical record indicates that they enjoyed about 45 seconds of fame--the running time of three 50-foot kinetographs--which was most likely 40 seconds more than necessary. The actual title of this short in its heyday was ROBETTA AND DORETO, No. 2, which will perhaps help out those of you losing sleep at night over the apparent absence of this flick from IMDb. (This duo's other two shorts ARE listed under their original tiles of "No. 1" and "No. 3," but IMDb is not as hack proof as Wikipedia, meaning that if you want to change their GONE WITH THE WIND listing to BORING WHITE PEOPLE MAKE TROUBLE, you'll probably be able to if you have high school level hacker skills!

This is probably a rather typical example of the many early movies that were based on popular vaudeville acts of the 1890s. It is, honestly, not really all that entertaining, but it is still of some interest, in that the more of these early features you can watch, the better that you can understand the techniques, subject matter, and standards of the very earliest film-makers."Robetta and Doretto" were a popular slapstick act on vaudeville at the time that this movie was made, and it films one of their typical routines, an altercation between a Chinese laundry worker and an Irish police officer. The characters are stock vaudeville types, and the setting likewise is a stagy-looking representation of a storefront. Even the actors' names are mere stage names, calculated to make the performers sound more interesting.The act itself would probably have been a bit more enjoyable if seen live, when color and sound effects could accompany the slapstick action. Later in cinema history, film-makers would learn how to design slapstick routines that made better use of the capabilities of the silent screen. Early features such as this one are not all that interesting in themselves, but they were a first step in the eventual development and refinement of motion picture comedy.