The Diabolic Tenant

7.2
1909 0 hr 7 min Fantasy , Comedy

A man rents an apartment and furnishes it in remarkable fashion.

  • Cast:
    Georges Méliès

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Reviews

Hellen
1909/01/01

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

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Linkshoch
1909/01/02

Wonderful Movie

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Solemplex
1909/01/03

To me, this movie is perfection.

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Intcatinfo
1909/01/04

A Masterpiece!

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Hitchcoc
1909/01/05

This six minute offering involves a man who apparently rents a room. All he has with him is a carpetbag. He begins pulling things out of the bag and placing them around the room. They include paintings, chairs, a table, people, a bureau, and on and on. Yet it all comes out of a tiny bag. There is some wonderful animation here and the pacing is dynamite. Of course, the landlord doesn't think much of what he's done to the place. So much fun.

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morrison-dylan-fan
1909/01/06

After catching landmark A Trip To The Moon,I found myself struggling to decide on what other work from Georges Méliès I should take a look at.Reading reviews from a fellow IMDber,I stumbled upon an excellent one for a Méliès movie I've not heard of before,which led to me getting ready to find out how devilish the tenant could be.The plot:Moving in to a new apartment with his bags,a man agrees on when to make the rent payment.Left on his own,the man pulls out furniture and his own family from the bag! Settling down in the apartment,the man suddenly remembers that the rent is overdue.View on the film:Displaying less of the literary ambitions of Moon,the screenplay by Méliès takes a minimalist approach in order to give the movie a clean setup which does not overshadow any of the visuals on offer.Mostly staying in one room, Méliès takes advantage of the minimal set-up to deliver constantly striking in-camera special effects,which still pack a punch of awe and wonder.Keeping events rolling in long takes, Méliès cleverly uses the dashes of smoke and ruby colours offered in colour tinting to cast a magic circle atmosphere over the tenant's devilish stay

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JoeytheBrit
1909/01/07

I've seen quite a few Melies film over the last couple of years - mostly in roughly chronological order - and watching them in this way drives home just how impossible he found it to adapt to the changing times. Like Emile Reynaud before him, Melies failed to evolve, and essentially ended up repeating the same story over and over by simply varying small details. He could easily have staged this film, in which the devilish tenant of the title produces the furniture for his new dwelling from a carpetbag, as a basic magic show, because there isn't really much of a story. Melies film career would pretty much be dead within another five years, which is a sad thing - had he been able to harness that incredible energy that is evident in every frame of this stencil-coloured film to develop all aspects of his filmmaking talents he might have gone on indefinitely...

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Snow Leopard
1909/01/08

This colorful and creative Georges Méliès feature takes a basic gag idea and uses it as the basis for several minutes of interesting and entertaining camera tricks. It is also one of the few surviving Méliès movies that have hand-tinted color, and while the color of the print has now somewhat faded, it still looks good enough to enhance the overall effect.The story starts with a man renting an unfurnished room, and then most of it is simply a wide variety of visual effects as the tenant furnishes his new apartment with things that he amazingly pulls out of a carpetbag. It's interesting and very detailed, and if you've ever seen "Mary Poppins", the basic effect is remarkably similar to the scene in which Mary moves into the Banks home and furnishes her room. The special effects in Méliès's movie are not as polished, but on the other hand it gets even more mileage out of the idea.This feature was made somewhat later than were most of Méliès's best-known movies, but it's easily one of the finest efforts of his later years as a film-maker. It takes one basic idea and makes it into an interesting and imaginative film.

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