DVD Review: The Magic Box (1951)

When a film is made specifically for the Festival Of Britain, you would expect it to look good and be star-packed. That's definitely the case with John Boulting's The Magic Box - but whether it's a great film is a different matter.

Magic Box is a glossy biopic, with Robert Donat as William Friese-Greene - the man alleged to have invented the moving picture. Whether he did or not is open to discusssion, but we'll not let that get in the way of a good plot. Working in a strange double flashback, the film essentially ends at the beginning, with Friese-Greene meeting up with his second wife, explaining to the underwhelmed partner that he has finally invented colour film. Why is she so underwhelmed? Well, the first of the flashbacks explains that.

You see, Friese-Greene is obsessed with invention, but lacks the business brain to exploit his talent, leaving his poor wife Edith (Margaret Johnston) and the children fighting off the debt collectors as he sits in his lab battling his way to another milestone. And Edith isn't the first to have suffered from Friese-Greene's obsession. A second flashback takes us back to the life he had with first wife Helena (Maria Schell), a life that was packed with riches as Friese-Greene became a successful photographer - only for him to lose everything in pursuit of the moving picture.

It's entertaining enough - and settled down on a Sunday afternoon with a mug of tea and a few biscuits, it'll probably take hold. And even when it doesn't, you can do some classic British film star spotting - Richard Attenborough, Margaret Rutherford and Laurence Olivier to name just three. And if you're into film history, you can marvel at the authentic pieces of vintage equipment on display and explained in great detail.

But that doesn't mean to say it's a great film. Robert Donat is likeable enough as a lead, but it's not a great performance. And the two flashbacks make life a bit confusing and indeed disjointed too - like someone has welded two pretty average films together in the hope of making a single good one.

What you do get is a good-looking, but fairly average and dated movie, good enough for an afternoon's TV viewing, but not quite enough to warrant paying for it.

Extras on the DVD:

None

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Comments

[Harvey Chartrand]

Thanks for the warning. I planned to purchase THE MAGIC BOX DVD, mainly because of that dream cast (which also includes the great Leo Genn and the delightful Miles Malleson), but I think I'll "freeze the green" on this one. Get it? The fundamental problem with THE MAGIC BOX is that its main protagonist is a real loser. Robert Donat's health was seriously undermined by this time, and he comes across as pathetic. Donat is no longer the dashing actor who portrayed the spies Richard Hannay in THE 39 STEPS and Peter Ouronov in KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR, but a ravaged older man who is fearful that his chronic asthma will soon render him unemployable (which it did).