À la conquête du pôle (1912)
Directed by Georges Méliès

Film Review

À la conquête du pôle (a.k.a. The Conquest of the Pole) has the distinction of being the last commercially successful film made by Georges Méliès before his company, Star Films, filed for bankruptcy.  Méliès's inability to move with the times and some ill-judged business ventures had taken their toll and by the end of his productive career the great cinematic pioneer had neither the money nor the motivation to keep up his astonishing output.  Loosely adapted from Jules Verne's novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, À la conquête du pôle feels like an all-too-obvious attempt by Méliès to emulate his most successful and best-known film, Le Voyage dans la lune (1902).  To watch them back-to-back you would never think that the two films were made a decade apart.  They tell virtually the same story, employ all the same visual gimmickry and have pretty well all the same gags - creatively, it is as if Méliès had stood still, totally incapable of developing as an artist but being perfectly content to stick with the formula that he had perfected.

As ever, Méliès had a finger, if not a complete fist, in every aspect of the film's production, and he naturally takes the lead role, a revered scientist-turned-explorer identical to the one he had played in Le Voyage dans la lune.  Where À la conquête du pôle does deviate from the earlier film it is usually via some unfortunate digressions into politically incorrect humour.  A group of suffragettes are mercilessly ridiculed in the opening scenes, and later Méliès indulges in some gratuitous national stereotyping, with characters dressed and named in accordance with the convention of the French comicbook (the American and German delegates are named respectively Bluff-Allo-Bill and Choukroutman).  For no logical reason, once the race to the pole is under way all of the competitors fly off into outer space and start colliding with comets and other heavenly bodies.   Maybe Le Voyage dans la lune Redux would have been a more apt title.

When we finally get to the North Pole after a slight detour across half the galaxy, it looks uncannily like the lunar landscape of Méliès's earlier film, but there is one massive treat in store: a gigantic, man-eating monster made entirely of ice.  It's patently obvious that as soon as it rears its ugly and wonderfully deranged head that the ice monster is just an oversized puppet, but it is by far the most imaginative and enjoyable thing in the entire film.  With his badly synchronised eye movements and clumsy mechanical head gyrations this icy Leviathan takes on a personality of his own and has no difficulty stealing the film, swallowing an explorer one minute, spitting him out whole the next, much as how a critic of the period may have reacted to the film.  Méliès's Ice Giant was the director's last great creation, a wacky precursor of King Kong and all those other gigantic man-eating monstrosities that would burst onto the cinema screen in later decades.

Film Synopsis

The world's greatest scientists gather to plan an expedition to the North Pole.  Various ingenious methods of reaching the pole are put forward but it is Professor Maboul's flying machine that creates most excitement.  So proud is he of his achievement that the professor invites the other scientists to his workshop where the machine is under construction.  Having chosen his team, made up of representatives from various countries, Maboul departs in his flying machine, followed by other scientists in their own weird creations.  The mortality rate is alarmingly high - many of the brave explorers meet a horrific end as their vehicles explode, disintegrate or crash.  Maboul's own machine collides with a constellation and comes hurtling down to earth, the crew miraculously surviving as they land in the frozen wastes of the Arctic.  In this polar wilderness Maboul and his team come across the most terrifying of beings - a fiercesome giant composed entirely of ice...