Comical Conjuring (1903)

• 50%
• 1903
• Comedy
• Georges Méliès

In a room filled with jugglers' properties of enormous size a prestidigitateur dressed in eccentric costume enters with his assistant. The servant, believing that he would be comfortable in an armchair, sits down in it, but finds that it conceals a bucket of water, in which he falls. The juggler brings a large empty cask and puts it upon a table and fills it up with several pails of water. He leaps into the cask to take a bath, but he is bitten and hastily gets out. The water has disappeared, and in turning the cask upside down, some roosters and chickens come out of it very much alive. He stands the cask up again and shows with a pail that it is filled with water just as at first. Suddenly there comes out of the cask a pretty young girl, whom the juggler places in a chair upon the table. When he has wrapped her up in a veil he aims at her an enormous pistol, fires it, and the flash resembles that of a large cannon. The veil falls, disclosing the assistant, and at the same time the young girl emerges from the cask on the other table. The juggler shuts the girl up in the cask and then tips it over and out of it emerge two suckling pigs, one of which is changed into a poodle just as he leaps into the juggler's arms. And again the juggler shows that the cask is full of water. He curls up upon it, doubles himself up and disappears within, only to reappear again through the floor, whilst the assistant is emerging from the cask. Both now empty the water out of the cask into a bucket. Each one leaps into the latter and disappears, but suddenly comes upon the scene through the cask. They make their exit after a salute, but they once more come into view within the cask wrapped in one another's embrace in a most ridiculous attitude.