Linbeymusol
Wonderful character development!
SeeQuant
Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction
Brooklynn
There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.
He_who_lurks
First of all, this short isn't racist. I would agree with the reviewer who said it was all about color contrasts. Second of all, I have no idea why Melies titled this "Off to Bloomingdale Asylum". I mean, come on, all it is is some black guys transforming into white guys and back again. OH WAIT, IT'S THE AUDIENCE WHO ENDS UP AT THE ASYLUM AFTER WATCHING IT BECAUSE THEY THINK THEY'RE HALLUCINATING! YUCK YUCK YUCK!Okay, so that joke wasn't really very funny. Anyway, Melies doesn't appear to star anywhere in this one, odd because he mostly appears somewhere in these trick films. Is he one of the blackface minstrels? I dunno. As far as the story goes, it's just silly but has an interesting slapstick ending. The effects are good throughout.
Horst in Translation ([email protected])
This one-minute film "L'omnibus des toqués blancs et noirs" may be considered racist because of the Blackfaces used in here, but I think these are too politically correct. Basically, this film only shows us what happens to stupid people, regardless which color. And color is a good keyword as Méliès proves here that, even without color in terms of film, it is very possibly to distinguish between all kinds of shades. This silent movie was made in the 20th century "already" by the famous French film pioneer and I would not count this among his best or worst works. Unfortunately, it's far more interesting visually than in terms of the story. As a whole, not recommended.
Michael_Elliott
L'omnibus des toqués ou Blancs et Noirs (1901) ** 1/2 (out of 4) aka Off to Bloomingdale Asylum This French film from Georges Melies has to be one of the earliest examples of a minstrel show. Four white men get out of a carriage and when they kick each other they then turn to black men. This little "trick" happens for about a minute and then the film is over. The subject matter is certainly going to offend many people today but there's certainly no question that the overall tone wasn't meant to be harmful as this certainly isn't in the same league as something like THE WATERMELON CONTEST. The special effect of seeing the men transform from black to white and then back again really doesn't look all that great and especially when you compare it to the other types of tricks that Melies was doing at this point in his career. The edits are all obviously done but then again you might not have noticed as much had the story been a bit better.
boblipton
One of Melies' trick films, this one actually has a bit of surrealism and psychology behind it as it purports to show the world according to minds of some madmen being transported off to the madhouse -- it was labeled as Bedlam in Britain and the then well-known Bloomingdale Asylum when distributed in the U.S. The whole thing is played for speed and laughs, of course, as the asylum ambulance is drawn by a chimera and the patients change and vanish in the blink of an eye. But if the modern viewpoint of how we perceive the mad is vastly different from that offered in this Melies piece, surely one can not hope to expect any depth in a piece that is on the screen for perhaps twenty seconds. For its time and place is is brilliant and more than a century later it is still a dazzling piece of film-making.
