Amateur movie with Big budget

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.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

First of all, this short isn't racist. I would agree with the reviewer who said it was all about color contrasts. Second of all, I have no idea why Melies titled this "Off to Bloomingdale Asylum". I mean, come on, all it is is some black guys transforming into white guys and back again. OH WAIT, IT'S THE AUDIENCE WHO ENDS UP AT THE ASYLUM AFTER WATCHING IT BECAUSE THEY THINK THEY'RE HALLUCINATING! YUCK YUCK YUCK!Okay, so that joke wasn't really very funny. Anyway, Melies doesn't appear to star anywhere in this one, odd because he mostly appears somewhere in these trick films. Is he one of the blackface minstrels? I dunno. As far as the story goes, it's just silly but has an interesting slapstick ending. The effects are good throughout.

One could always consider the use of blackface as racist (it was), but I think Melies was looking for a black and white contrast, so as the clowns and the minstrels switch back and forth, it will be visually interesting. I don't suppose with things being what they were, Melies would ever consider using black actors. Of course, I don't know what the possibilities were in France. This is a bit less than some of his other films.

L'omnibus des toqués ou Blancs et Noirs (1901) ** 1/2 (out of 4) aka Off to Bloomingdale Asylum This French film from Georges Melies has to be one of the earliest examples of a minstrel show. Four white men get out of a carriage and when they kick each other they then turn to black men. This little "trick" happens for about a minute and then the film is over. The subject matter is certainly going to offend many people today but there's certainly no question that the overall tone wasn't meant to be harmful as this certainly isn't in the same league as something like THE WATERMELON CONTEST. The special effect of seeing the men transform from black to white and then back again really doesn't look all that great and especially when you compare it to the other types of tricks that Melies was doing at this point in his career. The edits are all obviously done but then again you might not have noticed as much had the story been a bit better.

One of Melies' trick films, this one actually has a bit of surrealism and psychology behind it as it purports to show the world according to minds of some madmen being transported off to the madhouse -- it was labeled as Bedlam in Britain and the then well-known Bloomingdale Asylum when distributed in the U.S. The whole thing is played for speed and laughs, of course, as the asylum ambulance is drawn by a chimera and the patients change and vanish in the blink of an eye. But if the modern viewpoint of how we perceive the mad is vastly different from that offered in this Melies piece, surely one can not hope to expect any depth in a piece that is on the screen for perhaps twenty seconds. For its time and place is is brilliant and more than a century later it is still a dazzling piece of film-making.