The Society Raffles
The Society Raffles
| 23 December 1905 (USA)
The Society Raffles Trailers

A man in black tie and tails enters a high-society parlor where a settee sits beneath an open window. He goes to the window and gestures to someone. From outside, a man in a burglar's outfit (watch cap, wide striped shirt, and dark jacket) appears and gets his instructions from the man in tails. A woman wearing a jeweled tiara enters with a second man who leaves her in the company of our mastermind. He sits her on the settee, chats her up, leaning toward her with one arm curling behind her head.

Reviews
SparkMore

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

... View More
Plustown

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

... View More
filippaberry84

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

... View More
Ezmae Chang

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

... View More
boblipton

A man in evening clothes speaks to a burglar at a window, then sits with a young woman on a couch in front of the window. As they flirt, he removes a tiara from her head unnoticed, and passes it to the burglar.There are no tickets here, except for those sold to see the movie. The Raffles here is a reference to E.W. Hornung's gentleman jewel thief. It's hard to say whether this movie is meant to be shocking or funny in its brief length: quite probably both.Modern viewers will look on the clothes that the performers wear as cartoonish, but in the era, clothes were considered class markers, even as today one might judge people who wear certain sorts of clothes to be employed in certain lines work. When was the last time you saw a computer programmer who regularly wore a three-piece suit?

... View More
kekseksa

Such one-minute sketch films were most certainly not the norm by 1905. Following such films as Zecca's Histore d'une crime (1901), Méliès' Voyage à la lune (1902) and Robinson Crusoé (now known to survive in its full fifteen-minute version) (1903), Porter's The Great Train Robbery and Life of An American Fireman (both 1903) and McCutcheon's Personal (1903), The Moonshiners (1904) and The Nihilists (1905), Alberini's La Presa di Roma (1905) and Capellani's La Poule aux oeufs d'or (1905), it was now reasonably oommon to make at least two-shot and three-shot films and they could run anything up to fifteen minutes. Not long to us but a very marked advance at the time.The 1905 date is a copyright date and Mutoscope (unlike Edison) was very careless about copyrighting its films and it is perfectly possible that this is in fact an older film (1902 or 1903 when such vaudeville sketch-films were common) and simply was not copyrighted until 1905 (Mutoscope copyrightd its films in batches).Alternatively it may have been hurried out a a response to (and/or indeed potential accompaniment for) the first genuine film of the Adventures of Raffles which was made the same year by Vitagraph. It is sometimes ascribed to Gilbert Anderson (the future "Broncho Billy ") but was more probably the work of Stuart Blackton. and starred J. Barney Sherry (in his first film). Vitagraph also produced the first Sherlock Holmes film the same year, directed by Stuart Blackton but again featuring J. Barney Sherry (probably in fact as Watson). Sadly, since so many Vitagraph films were not preserved in paper copy and were later destroyed in celluloid by a spectacular studio-fire, only fragments of the Sherlock Holmes film are thought to survive..It is also no quite true to suppose that the film was not meant to look a bit silly. While the film companies continues to show excerpts from vaudeville sketches, they were beginning to become distinctly sniffy about popular theatre performances in general (vaudeville and melodrama) and about the exaggerated style of acting used so there was an increasingly tongue-in-cheek aspect to their reproduction on film.

... View More
MartinHafer

This very early film is less than a minute in length. This is not surprising, as back in this time period, films were rarely more than a minute or two long. Because of this, it's really hard to assign it a score so I am leaving it blank.When the film begins, a man in a tux talks to his confederate outside the window. It's funny, as the confederate is dressed in the most ridiculous outfit--like a comic book burglar! When a lady enters, the guy in the tux woos her as he steals her tiara and passes it out the window to his fellow crook. When this amazingly bad actress sees the crook, she does one of the worst swooning performances I can recall having seen! All in all, a film with only minor interest and some bad acting.

... View More