Simple magic trick, but it's clever and well edited and performed.

I find myself instinctively drawn to the lengthily titled Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin largely for the same reasons as I was endeared to his later Tchin-Chao, the Chinese Conjuror. Primitive in design and culmination, this Melies short smartly hints at how future filmmakers would come to more ably manipulate continuity through the employment of cutting and pacing. After the fact, it's still slight.

A trick film in which the trick is rather obvious, but I don't mind. There's just something about these little films of Melies in which he's basically a one-man show that's consistently endearing, since at one minute the movie can't possibly wear out its welcome. The replacing of the woman with the skeleton and back again recalls fond memories of a similar scene in _Lord of Illusions_. Georges Melies vs. Nix -- boy, would I love to see that...