The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895)

...BUT WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!?!?!?!?!?! I Have Seen Thousands Of Historical Movies & Know A Lot About History. Mary Got Her Head Chopped 3 Times Before It Came Off. The Visual Effects Are The Only Thing I Won't Criticise. Now One Small Question Where Is The Gore? Yep There Is No Gore In This...Charlie Chaplin Made More Gore In His Films Than This Did. I Like Classical Movies I Saw Roundhay Garden Scene, & Traffic Crossing Leads Bridge & They're Both Better & They Have No Plot. Edison Should've Left His Film To The Lumiere Brothers & Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince...All 3 People Made Cinema History...Edison Is Not Famous For Any Work He Did On Film But For His OTHER Inventions...& Quite Frankly I Can See Why Thats The Case.

Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, The (1895) *** 1/2 (out of 4)This Edison short was one of the first movies to deal with a real event and the payoff is actually very good. Mary Stuart is taken to the chopping block where she puts her head down and has it hacked off. The special effects in the film are very well done but I'm not sure if the edit is done in a good fashion or if we just can't see it because the print quality is so shaky. Either way this is nicely done and shows that there were some violent films being made back in the day. I've read that this film was pulled from various places because people actually believed that the woman gave her life for the movie. You can't help but think what these folks would feel about certain violent movies of today.

One of many films produced by Thomas Edison throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, 'The Execution of Mary Stuart,' sometimes referred to as 'Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots,' is reportedly the first film in history to implement trained actors. The film, running less than a minute, is comprised of two stationary shots (passed off as one for the purposes of the visual trickery), and shows an understandably somber Mary being led to the chopping block, where an axe-wielding executioner waits expectantly. Courageously, Mary obediently follows instructions to kneel down, and she lays her neck across the chopping block. With one solid hack, Mary's head comes clean off, her body slumps to the ground and the executioner ominously holds her severed head towards the camera.Never mind the glaring historical inaccuracies (it is generally agreed upon by historians that, on February 8 1587, it took three blows before Mary's head was hacked off); this is a genuinely chilling little film, and I can only imagine how unsettling audiences of its day must have found it. Even though we can clearly see the cut where the actor (Robert Thomae) was substituted with a dummy, the moment when the axe appears to slice clean through Mary's neck certainly gave me a start.

For the technicals, I am sure they could'nt have done better for 1895, but this is quite pathetic... I can easily see the camera moving a little when the actor is replaced. I expected something horrorish but it was'nt at all! The 'video' does also not really appeal to the reality happening. I would not expect a woman to be so easy during the beheading scene, since it would be that she would fight for her life and struggle or at least cry during the process. None of this is to see. You also see the head moving when the actor gets replaced by the dummy of which you can then easily see the fakeness. This was like an experiment of trying to make an early ghost picture.