The Dude and the Burglars (1903) User Reviews

Set up the Camera there, Billy

[boblipton · 4/10 · 1 November 2014]

A young man enters a drawing room to find a young lady threatened by two burglars. He coolly draws a gun and tells a servant to send for the police. While waiting, he has to deal with one of the burglars being similarly armed.

There isn't much to this Wallace MacCutcheon scene. Fifty seconds doesn't allow much time develop anything in the way of plot or character. Despite Billy Bitzer's credit as the camera man, there isn't anything of note in the photography, although I did manage to convince myself briefly of the shadowings of the Biograph Right Wall.... which vanished on looking at it again.

There is an attempt to fill up the time with comings and goings and threats being quelled. Clearly MacCutcheon thought his audience needed more than had been offered to them, but it still is a primitive piece.

Lots of Action, & Interesting In Terms of Cinema Development

[Snow Leopard · 17 February 2005]

This miniature from over a century ago has plenty of action packed into its short running time, and it also has a couple of features that make it pretty interesting as a stage in the development of cinema. The camera field is fixed, as is often the case with movies of its era, and all the characters and action have to move into the camera field, rather than having the camera follow. But even so, it tells a reasonably interesting story.

In one sense, it's a fairly simple story: two violent burglars are confronted by the couple who live in the house that the burglars are robbing. But there is a lot packed into the one scene, with several changes of fortune as events play out. It's not hard to see how the scene could have been drawn out much longer to very good effect, by taking a little more time between developments either to build up more suspense, develop the characters, or both. And indeed, even a few years later, that's certainly what would have been done.

The film-makers were making an ambitious attempt to create something more than a film with just one or two events, and this is a creditable effort for 1903, even though it would not be long before film-makers could make something like this work much better.

The title is also interesting, in that the description, "The Dude and the Burglars", along with the appearance of the main character, is clearly intended to draw attention to him as someone you might not expect to rise to the occasion. It's easy to think of many later movies that expand considerably on the basic idea, since it can be used as a basis either for comedy or for drama. Again, it would be unfair to compare this one with movies that came much later, but in itself it's not bad.