"The Fat and the Lean Wrestling Match" is a Georges Méliès short film that tells us a but about gender roles around 1900, 115 years ago. Very early, we see two women in fancy dresses and they reappear in this almost 2-minute-long short film, but most of the time we see two men wrestling. But it's more than that. Méliès uses trick photography again to create 3 funny and awkward situations where obviously one of the fighters was a doll used for that particular moment. All in all, it's a solid Méliès film, not among his best. Obviously, this is still black-and-white and silent, even if there are versions out there where people used soundtracks. Not that great too watch though except the scenes where the master used the trick photography I mentioned before.

In this film, master cinematic experimenter Georges Méliès uses his celebrated trickery to depict a wrestling match. The effect is like a live action cartoon. Except that this is 1901 and animated cartoons hadn't even been invented yet! In other words it's quite original. And it's really still quite amusing too. Méliès fills its short running time with a barrow load of comic invention. We have women morphing into men; a man having his head and limbs knocked off and reassembled; and a fellow who is flattened like a pancake. What this movie shows, apart from Méliès mastery of visual trickery, is his sense of humour and comic timing. Some comedy shows from a few years ago are no longer amusing, so it's really quite impressive that this feature from over one hundred years ago still manages to raise a few smiles.

We see two women covering themselves with blankets. When they uncover themselves, they are now two men. These two men start to wrestle. One of them manages to throw the other around. The other one then literally knocks his head off as well as his arms, legs, and feet! He then puts the dismembered parts together when he places the body together on the bench. The women come back to take the men away from the screen. Two different men appear who are much bigger. The bigger of the big manages to flatten the other one like a pancake. After the flattened one comes back to normal, he throws the other one up before that other one lands back on him! They wrestle a little before the less heavy of the big men manages to pin him down and jump on him, causing his arms, legs, and head to disassemble on impact! After he leaves, the disassembled man assembles and walks out of screen. The end. It is here that Georges Melies takes a popular fairground sport and gives it a cartoonish feel on film. It certainly should be fascinating to today's wrestling fans who think wrestling was invented only recently!

This funny and imaginative Georges Méliès comedy plays off of the popularity of fairgrounds-style wrestling, adding some humorous touches and a good assortment of the kind of special camera effects for which Méliès is so well-remembered. As with so many of his features, he manages to squeeze a lot of material out of a simple premise.As the movie begins, the wrestlers are two women, but they are only the prelude. The 'main event' features two men wrestling, with some moves and mishaps that you could normally only see in a cartoon. It bears watching closely to notice all of the visual effects that Méliès slipped in, because they go past pretty quickly at times.The camera tricks are quite good for 1900, and show both skill and imagination, in the ideas and in carrying them off. There are only a small handful of times when the illusion does not quite come off, and most of it still holds up pretty well even now.