User Reviews

This is a very good early comedy which I have on video (From British Film Institute). It's well ahead of it's time in that it's the sort of thing Keystone etc were doing 10 years later. Basically it's a man who's that engrossed in his book as he walks to work that he falls over a woman scrubbing her steps, walks into a skipping rope as children play and finally gets flattened by a steam roller. Two passers by pump him up with a bicycle pump. He thanks them and carries on along his way reading his book. I've not seen anything as funny as this from this very early period.

This is the kind of film Chaplin might have made had he been making movies in 1905, its' humour and inventiveness are that impressive. But then it's a film made by James Williamson - one of the Brighton School of early British filmmakers - and by 1905 he had already demonstrated that he was a man capable of producing quality material.

The story is slight but fast-moving and humorous. Our hero is so absorbed in the book he is reading that he can't bear to raise his head from it which means he is fortunate to somehow survive a number of potentially fatal encounters with scrubbing housewives, skipping children and slow-moving steamrollers.

... as most early films were very short in length by necessity and were slices of life. Anything that was not a slice of life was usually a historical reenactment.

This is an attempt at early slapstick. It's about a man who is so engrossed in what he is reading that he pours milk into his bowler hat rather than a cereal bowl, on his way to work trips over a servant cleaning the walkway, and then, with nose still in book, almost meets a tragic end in the streets if not for the presence of two men and a bicycle pump.

Filmed in the UK, this story is still relevant today if you simply exchange the book with a cell phone. James Williamson is the director, and he originally processed film for other early filmmakers until he began making films of his own. The actors are unidentified, although the main actor's style is reminiscent of Chaplin's.

This short comedy is constructed quite well. It gets a lot of mileage out of a simple story idea, combining some obvious slapstick with a few touches of more subtle humor. In developing several scenes based on the same basic gag - a man reading "An Interesting Story" who is thus oblivious to his surroundings - it is quite resourceful, and it reminds you of some of the more carefully developed silent comedies that would come a little later. Williamson was more known for a couple of significant short dramatic features, but this shows that he knew how to make a comedy, too. It's an entertaining little feature that was made with skill.

A man burying himself in a book may well end up buried because of it as he carelessly goes about his day, nose between the pages. Breakfast is a catastrophe and his walk to work truly pedestrian as he stumbles over a washer woman and gets tangled in a kids jump rope before being literally flattened by a steamroller.

Known in some circles as the first slapstick comedy (Lumiere's Sprinkled Sprinkler 1895 puts that argument to rest) this brief short offers end to end pratfalls and some comic surrealism. The lead does not have the acrobatic abilities of a Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd but he may have well influenced them.

Like other turn of the 20th century Silents (La Barbe 1908) an ironic cautionary tale for today with hardly a day passing without some I phone user walking into traffic.

A gentleman is so engrossed in his book that he serves tea in his hat, walks into people, animals and things, and eventually is crushed by a steamroller, the lumbering approach of which he is oblivious. Fortunately, a couple of cyclists witness the flattening and with aid of their trusty tyre pumps reinflate the hapless reader, whose main concern is finding his book and his hat. Whoever was in charge of continuity goofed - the victim's hat was moved during the substitution splice that returned him to 3D corporality, revealing the 'trick'. Silly but funny and likely the inspiration for decades of comic steamroller shtick.

Here's an odd little thing - A Peculiar Story might have fit it better than the 'Interesting' word of the title (surely there are better/more creative words for what this film turns into), where we follow a man as he pours coffee into his hat, stumbles over girls playing jump-rope, can't stop reading his book and then, not unlike Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, gets run over by a steamroller. But that's not the end of what seems like a rather dark turn in the story.

This is a clever little movie, even as it seems to exist simply to showcase this man having pratfalls. And yet there's a musical quality to it, a rhythm that makes it work as cinema, and the actor is also endearing as an on-screen presence. He works because he knows just when to pour the coffee into the wrong place and when to follow it up with. He's not the Tramp, but it should be clear to almost no one that he must have seen this; if nothing else it fits as being true vaudeville (except for the climax and conclusion, which leaps off into fantasy land).

It's... cute, and weird.

This is an early example of a slapstick story. It's as simple as can be. A man is so engrossed in his book – the 'interesting story' of the title – that he is oblivious to everything else going on around him. He begins in his house and then goes for a walk, the whole time reading his book. All manner of things happen around him to his complete ignorance, ending with hem being flattened by a steam-roller.

Its very simplistic stuff. It seems very basic now but I suppose at the time this would have been a pretty original idea. George Méliès had brought slapstick to the screen before this of course, and usually with a more wild imagination. What this one does differently I guess is to do this but within the framework of a simple story, as opposed to a single camera shot and one set. Later on the likes of Charlie Chaplin would make very popular feature films using the basic template set down here. So there is no doubt about its historical significance.

A man reads an interesting book at breakfast. It absorbs him so completely that he pours coffee into his hat. He continues reading it as he walks into the street, colliding with various people..... and a steam roller in this amusing variation on Walter Booth's AN EXTRAORDINARY CAB ACCIDENT.

The director this movie, James Williamson, came into film-making not through photography, but because he ran a chemist shop -- where he presumably developed film -- and expanded into selling photographic equipment, in Hove, quite near George A. Smith's St Ann's Well Pleasure Garden. Besides shooting and directing his own films, he patented a couple of devices useful for film production, founded a company to produce photographic equipment that was active at least until the Second World War, and lived until 1933.

The IMDb trivia for this movie notes that it is considered to be the earliest slapstick film -- obviously no one has ever heard of at least three version of THE MILLER AND THE SWEEP released in 1897.

"An Interesting Story" follows a man whose attention is consumed by a book; nevertheless, the man attempts to have breakfast and walk somewhere while continuing to read. It's a rather amusing film for being made in 1904, as we see him pour his coffee in his hat, run into people, and be run over by a road roller. The film also features some early, not so seamless, stop-substitutions (jump cuts) to switch the actor for a dummy.

Otherwise, the continuity between shots is good. The film's author James Williamson was early cinema's foremost pioneer of continuity and direction of action across the screen--that is, from shot to shot. The grammar of this six-scene film is more interesting when compared to his other films that also develop the rules of continuity editing, which include "Attack on a China Mission" (1900), "Stop Thief!", "Fire!" (both 1901) and "Our New Errand Boy" (1905). As opposed to the usual lateral left/right staging of action across the screen, which was used more frequently in "Fire!", "An Interesting Story" follows mostly an in depth staging of background/foreground and employs reverse angle shots. He also did this in "Attack on a China Mission". Additionally, this is the only example of Williamson's work in editing that I've seen where the characters and action aren't in a hurry.

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

Here we have a man reading a gripping book at the breakfast table. Totally engrossed in his book he puts milk in his hat among other things. Leaving the house he continues to read and finds he comes to more mischief. As with their other films, this company produces a film that is imaginative, amusing and technically quite impressive. The joke is simple but very effective and is used well to set up a collection of pratfalls and accidents that range from the ordinary to the "flat out" extraordinary. It is funny for the most part and I did like the way that the effects are used as part of the joke.

Overall then an amusing and well delivered film that is as interested in the importance of timing as it is in the effects and other technical aspects of the delivery.