Really Surprised!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

While this is a pretty entertaining little gag film from the earliest years of cinema, it's sadly not original at all. Previously, George Albert Smith had made a short film entitled "Let Me Dream Again" (1900) that used the exact same basic gag. This film, while being a ripoff of that other film, is not bad--it actually flows at a faster pace while the other drags a little in spots. I liked the de-focus used in the original a lot better than the dissolve used here--but the wife in this version is lots more homely. They're both about equal all around.

As others have noted, this is an early example of an exact copy of one studio's film being made by another - in this case, the French giants Pathe Frere rip-off British filmmaker George Albert Smith. It was a common practice back in the early days of cinema when film-making was subject to even more piracy than the internet is today.The film itself is quite amusing - in fact it is probably slightly better than the original thanks to a much brisker pace, and a prettier girl in the first scene which makes for a funnier contrast with the old hag (who is probably a man in drag) in the second. It's certainly still quite amusing even today, nearly 110 years later.

It just so happens that the same night I watched this very early silent short, I also watched a film by George Albert Smith that was made one year earlier--entitled "Let Me Dream Again". And, low and behold, the two films were nearly 100% identical!! This film (Rêve et réalité) was definitely not inspired from Smith's--it was a complete rip-off---being a wonderful example of early plagiarism. This was not a unique thing, as there were so many tiny studios in the early days and copying others' films wasn't unusual. But, in this case it's more than re-making the other film--it's stealing it.Regardless of the spotty pedigree, this still is a pretty funny film. It features an old guy making out with a pretty young lady--and it all turns out to be too good to be true. This is one of the few early films that still will get you to laugh today--no small accomplishment.

The idea of a story involving "Rêve et Réalité" (Dream and Reality) was a familiar one in very early cinema, and despite how old this film is, it was not the first to use the concept. But it's a watchable version of the idea, and is mildly amusing, at least as far as the simple story allows it to be. The story is really just one key gag, but the movie sets it up efficiently enough, without wasting time or energy. The idea itself can also be (and was later) used more thoughtfully, but this particular feature only went as far as it had already been developed by others.Technically, it's relatively polished for its time, with the dissolve effect working well as one picture transforms into another. If the idea itself had not already been a familiar one, this could be considered as pretty good. Even as it is, it's at least worth seeing if you are interested in these very old movies, and it's understandable if cinema's pioneers sometimes wanted to try their hands at filming ideas that others had already used. They certainly had better reasons to do so than do today's film-makers when they continually recycle material that wasn't all that good in the first place. This feature is fairly well-crafted; it just isn't anything really new even for the time.