The Disintegrated Convict

Another of my recent Blu-ray purchases was a 3-disc box set of Vitagraph Comedies, featuring a bunch of one-reelers from the early days of the studio (I think the earliest is from 1907) through to the late days of the studio after World War I. I recently put Disc 1 into the player, and watched both a brief intro about the films and the set, as well as the first of the shorts, The Disintegrated Convict.

The 2024 intro, produced by Kino Classics, includes a couple of the archivists at the Library of Congress who were responsible for cataloguing, restoring, and selecting the shorts seen in this collection, along with some brief comments about things that surprised them, such as they thought some of the shorts labeled as comedies weren't funny at all, and it wasn't just because the material was dated. This intro runs about 13 minutes and while it doesn't provide a whole lot of information, it's certainly a good-enough general introduction.

As for the short I watched, The Disintegrated Convict, since it's only six minutes and change there's not much plot here. A man gets put into a prison cell, where the cops who brought him in hang him by his wrists so that he can't escape, except that they're stupid enough to leave the door to the cell unlocked so that even if he could somehow get down, he could just walk right out. The man does get down, but in a unique way: he "disintegrates" and rematerializes, which is of course handled with crude special effects; unsurprisingly mention is made in the commentaries of Georges Meliès.

After the prisoner escapes, the police chase him Keystone Kops style, except that this is several years before the Keystone series. Each time, the convict "escapes" by morphing into something different, which is a setup for the various effects and sight gags. This being 1907, there's no real resolution since there's not exactly much plot.

There's a new piano score, as well as a second track with commentary from a British film historian, who intelligently pointed out the first thing I noticed, which is that the prison wall had an extremely noticeable Vitagraph logo on it; this was obviously done to try to deter making bootleg copies since film copyright was handled differently in those days. As I understand it, individual images could be copyrighted and deposited with the Library of Congress.

The packaging for this set is similar to that of the Miklos Jancso collection I mentioned recently, in that each disc gets its own spindle, with two of the discs back-to-back on a hinge that turns like a page; the third disk is on the inside of the back, much like a traditional standalone DVD or Blu-ray. No particular rating of the short; it's interesting enough and I assume the shorts here will be of variable quality with different viewers finding some better/funnier than others.