The Cook in Trouble

Sorcellerie culinaire (scène clownesque), released in the US as The Cook in Trouble and in the UK as Cookery Bewitched, is a 1904 French silent trick film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 585–588 in its catalogues.^[1]

Méliès plays the cook in the film. Special effects used include pyrotechnics and substitution splices.^[1]

The action of the film is a variation on the "trapdoor chase", a type of spectacular chase sequence particularly associated with the Lupino family of performers, including Lupino Lane. In Méliès's version, the trapdoors are designed as openings within the kitchen set: a window, an oven door, a pot, a drawer, and so on.^[2] Describing the film for British exhibitors, Charles Urban's film catalogue called the result "acrobatic".^[1]

With its fast-paced antics, designed to build up a hectic visual rhythm rather than to advance a narrative, The Cook in Trouble has been seen as a particularly modernist Méliès film, presaging Dadaism and Surrealism^[3] as well as Mack Sennett's chase films.^[1] Film historian John Frazer, who praised The Cook in Trouble as "one of the high peaks among the films of Georges Méliès" and compared it with Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi,^[4] commented:

The plot is largely irrelevant, being so encrusted by choreographed acrobatics. More than any other factor it is this bifurcating, simultaneous movement that gives this film its particularly modern feel.^[4]

According to the summary in Méliès's American catalogue, The Cook in Trouble originally ended with the cook's clothes being retrieved from the cooking pot; this ending is missing from the surviving copy of the film.^[1]

• The Cook in Trouble at IMDb