Robert Paul made some pretty good films, from documentary to comedy. Here, he gives the direction over to Walter Booth, who directed various other films for Paul. Clearly these two were trying to imitate Georges Melies, but here the result is actually very good. And, while it has trick effects, these effects are used for both comedic and story-telling purposes, which makes it ahead of Melies's work.A crazy, law-breaking motorist is chased by a cop for speeding. He goes up the side of a building and ends up in space, rides around Saturn's rings, and eventually plummets back to earth, landing in a courthouse. Pretty crazy and absurd, just the thing 1906 audiences were looking for. While it's easy to see how the effects are done, (such as superimposing the car onto the building when it goes up the side) that doesn't really matter as the film is still pretty entertaining and works very well. In fact, it actually would still work well enough today.

R W Paul was an influential British film maker in the early days of cinema. Sadly a lot of his output has been lost.The motorist from 1906 remains and we see the embryonic influence of early slapstick such as the policeman being run over and then chasing after car is something that will come to prominent a few years later in Hollywood silents with the likes of Charlie Chaplin.We also see here the debt to Georges Melies as there is a lot of trick photography as well as art and set direction inspired by Melies output such as a car driving in space and on the rings of Saturn.Some of the special effects are not on par with Melies but we see these short films moving on from being just point and shoot.

This is an exceptional trick film from early cinema. The trick film was one of the most popular genres of the time, popularized and created by Georges Méliès. This one by Robert W. Paul and Walter R. Booth is superior to Méliès's films in the respect that it's not chained to the tableau style of storytelling that Méliès relentlessly pursued in his attempt to make film an extension of theatre. That is, instead of one complete scene followed by another, generally linked by dissolves, this film is linked by simple, continuously smoother cuts. Scenes are somewhat dissected and action moves from shot to shot in a modern continuity fashion. It also isn't confined to the stage--the cramped studio in which Méliès worked with the camera taking the position of the proscenium arch.The open space allows for the common gag of a car running over a man (replaced by a dummy), which is technically done fairly well here for the time. From there, the car and occupants drive up a building and up to the sky and, eventually, outer space. The sky and outer space bit seems characteristic of what Méliès had been doing. The final gag is also quite clever--playing with the notion of the good 'ole horse carriage as safe and the newfangled automobile as dangerous: a common theme in trick films. This is zany, fun stuff, and I can see why these "cinema of attractions" continued to coexist with the generally less entertaining story films. Apparently, having since left Paul and Paul having since left the movie business, Booth remade this in 1911 as "The Automatic Motorist".

A charmingly subversive comedy-fantasy that pays handsome tribute to the cinema's sister invention, the automobile, suggesting both have the power to disrupt conventional society. It uses the kind of trickery perfected by Melies, but is arguably more potent because of its (relative) grounding in real life.A well-to-do couple speed down a sunny country road, ordered to stop by an approaching pedestrian policeman. They promptly, gloriously, run him over. As he gives chase, the motorists are blocked by a large building, which they drive up with exhilirating ease. While the blundering bobby gazes in bafflement, the drivers zip through space, circling the moon, skating Saturn's rings, before running out of petrol, freefalling, and collapsing on a court-case that was at any rate degenerating into farce.Although you can obviously see the joins, the inventiveness of this short holds up remarkably well, as it shows that cars are a nuisance off, as well as on the road. The invention of the motor-car brought with it a greater mobility, a shortening of distances, in effect shortening time and space; as it became possible to travel to more places more quickly, the world became a smaller place.Ditto the cinema, which could do so much more than the mere photographing of things - not only visiting new worlds, but creating them, inviting our imagination to soar above the mundane. Unlike our own fantasy films, however, audiences then were not hypnotised into forgetting real life, the mendacious absurdity of our social institutions, the arbitrary ineptitude of our law enforcers - is it any wonder we might want to escape?The film is treasurable for that glorious moment when the peeler, with doltish complacency, linked to the immemorial countryside as he attempts to control this new-fangled aberrance, is upended - thud! - against a steaming bonnet, the majesty of the law a sprawling punchline.