What a waste of my time!!!

disgusting, overrated, pointless

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Yesterday I compared Edison's 1902 rendering of JACK AND THE BEANSTALK versus the entertaining new release, JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (2013), which I had seen as a double feature the day before. The gist of knowing your Jacks was that the Edison short is morally reprehensible, while the remake teaches solid American values. When you compare notorious elephant-electrocuter Thomas Edison's WHAT HAPPENED . . . to Marilyn Monroe's 1955 remake, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, the EXACT SAME THING is seen. Edison's henchmen have produced something akin to kiddie porn, positioning what should be an innocent young lad of 8 or 12 as the focal point for the first 69 seconds of the 82-second offering. The corrupted boy is leering and drooling uncontrollably as the rest of the many people on the sidewalk go about their business (the Edison perverts no doubt ran the youngster through 30 or 40 takes). When it comes time for the big reveal of the unsuspecting stranger lady's unmentionables, the innocent's face contorts with an expression which should have been delayed until his honeymoon. Monroe in ITCH, on the other hand, is thrown into a trying position with another consenting adult, and the New York subway does its level best to tip the pair over the line into outright adultery. However, since Edison was not around to corrupt this pair as children when their moral fibers were woven together, the summer neighbors resist their virtually undeniable attraction despite the subway's up-blown skirting, with proper decorum and marriage vows intact at the end.

I don't know if anyone has put music to this, but I saw it plainly silent.It's actually a pretty interesting film. You see the busy life of the street as people mill about the road and sidewalk. There is some horse-and-buggy and trolley traffic in the road too, and some boys with a cart.The thing that stands out first is the teenage boy (or short man) midway down the sidewalk, staring directly at us, hands behind his back, hardly moving at all, unlike anyone else we see.Why is he looking at us? What's he looking for? After a minute, we learn the reason, as the star couple walks over the grate just in front of us, and she gets her Marilyn Monroe moment.Once they pass, though, it just that boy again, staring at us, walking slowly in our direction, now shown to be carrying a lunch-box sort of thing in his right hand, and smaller parcel in his left. It's actually kind of creepy at this point, as other than the change in his hands, he seems entirely unaffected by what we all just saw.

This short film starts with around forty seconds of people living their lives on 23rd Street in New York. In the distance we see a man constantly watching the camera. He made me wondering if the scene was about him. Other people walk by, some react like they are told to move out of the frame. Then a couple walks into sight and when the woman steps over an air duct her skirts lifts up, showing us her legs. The couple laughs it off and walks on. The short film ends with a young boy turning his laughing head towards the camera.One has to see this short film from the Edison Manufacturing Company as if it is 1901. When you see a women walking in a bikini top these days not so many people are surprised, but back then it was somewhat different. What we see in this short could also be the inspiration for Marilyn Monroe's lifting skirt in 'The Seven Year Itch', a scene considered by many as sexually charged. For a short film from the early days 'What Happened on 23rd Street' is pretty amusing.

Of all the short films in the four disc Edison/Kino set this is the one I liked the best. And it's amazing it's from 1901. The majority of the films from the historic Edison Co. survived only in a paper print form. That is each frame of a particular film was printed on photographic paper and deposited in the LOC(Library of Congress). It's a very good fortune that these films were randomly deposited in this manner else they might have stayed lost forever. The paper prints, fortunately, were one or two steps away from the clarity of the camera negative, thus the pictorial quality on some of these early gems is quite clear as opposed to the murky/muddy quality we're used to seeing on films of this very early vintage.WHAT HAPPENED ON 23RD STREET, is valuable as it documents a section of New York City that could probably be matched up today to the very point where the cameraman was filming. This film also has fun at tempting the sexual attitudes of it's time. Looking at it today you basically see people going about their daily affairs, though one can't help wondering if a taping measure or mark-off point has been told to the people to stay away & not look at the camera. Anyhow no one looks at the camera nor gets near it until the close of the film. Then the 'starring' couple walks up and the young woman in long skirt walks over an air duct and parts of her skirt fly up just above the knees. The lady and her male friend get a kick out of this but they would've understood the moral implications of this. They walk off laughing trying to play it off that she didn't know that there was an air grate on the sidewalk and that her dress would rise high up to her head.It's hard for us today to believe that this was being risqué. But there was a time in America that if a woman showed her legs in public it could throw men into a frenzy. And no doubt many a man enjoyed this flick for the sexually stimulating experience of seeing her skirt go up and viewing her legs. Another thing is that this film must have been available in some kind of form in the 1950s since the same type of scene is virtually aped by Marilyn Monroe in the movie The Seven Year Itch. But to less effect if you ask me.