An Interesting Story (1904)

AN INTERESTING STORY (1904) ****
One of the best qualities of the best early silent films is how they would regularly take a simple idea and play it to the hilt in a short time, like the explosive 150-second The Man with the Rubber Head from 1901 and the nearly 6-minute That Fatal Sneeze from 1907.

That hilt-playing simplicity also helps define An Interesting Story from 1904, where a man, who knows it might even be director James Williamson himself, gets so taken by a book that he simply cannot put it down to the point that he becomes a virtual danger to society, including himself. This short could be made today, of course in color rather than black & white if you so prefer, but the protagonist would (most likely) be engrossed by the latest, greatest, most upgraded cellular device. Since I returned to college in 2008, it’s been about 13 years then since I first started noticing that I would regularly be the one person in the room (crowded or not) looking up and not down into the abyss of a cellular device. Generation gap most clearly expressed through differences in phones? Possibly.

Anyway, what book could the unnamed protagonist be reading in An Interesting Story? The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport by Laura Lee Hope? Green Mansions by William H. Hudson? The Country of the Blind by H.G. Wells? The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley? Dreamers by Knut Hamsun? Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie? Nostromo by Joseph Conrad? The Sea Wolf by Jack London? Just to take a sampling from works first published in 1904. Naturally, it could have been an older book.

Off the top of my head, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye are the books I plowed through in one sitting, but I remained safely within the confines of my isolation chamber and No animals were harmed during the reading of this book each time. Just think I didn’t even turn into an insect like Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis.

Getting somewhat back on track here, An Interesting Story utilizes a steamroller for comedic effect some 84 years before The Naked Gun (which also gave arch villain Ricardo Montalban a great big fall from a baseball stadium, a bus, and a marching band with the steamroller between the bus and the band) and A Fish Called Wanda (when Ka-Ka-Ka-Ken gets his great desserts against Otto, that stupid, brute, vulgar American).

Yes, you could definitely say that An Interesting Story was ahead of its time.