The Society Raffles (1905) User Reviews

The Prize: One Tiara

[boblipton · 5/10 · 16 July 2018]

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?

A bit silly...and it wasn't meant to be.

[planktonrules · 31 March 2014]

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.

Raffles and Sherlock Holmes in 1905

[kekseksa · 9 May 2018]

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.