This early Segundo de Chomon piece looks like one of the typical pieces that he did in competition to Georges Melies: a mixture of stage magic and screen magic as pieces of scenery moves about and a row of pretty girls do some mediocre toe dancing, vanishing and reappearing as the camera is stopped and turned back on. It cannot begin to compete with Melies' vivacity and joy in performing and his ability to draw scenery that looks brilliantly realistic and three dimensional.One way in which de Chomon competes and does better than Melies at this stage is in color. Pathe freres, his employers at this stage, had a stencil coloring method that was highly labor intensive -- think of Currier & Ives prints, but offered brilliant colors. The surviving prints of this movie are quite lovely even more than a century after they were produced, while few of Melies' works survive in color. Even so, the color, to the modern eye, is more a distraction and their over-elaboration verges on annoyance.