This famous black comedy was, sadly, the last film by early cinema pioneer, G.A. Smith. Like Dreyer, Bergman and Lang after him, he takes essentially theatrical material to create pure cinema. The setting seems stock Victoriana, as an inept scullery maid blows herself to smithereens (no pun intended!) with paraffin oil - the forbiddingly bare kitchen; the wink-to-the-audience broadness of the acting, from Smith's wife, star of so many of his films.<br /><br />But it does what theatre could never hope to do- it shatters the restricted theatrical space as Mary Jane flies through the chimney; and it brings the dead back to life, just as cinema preserves and makes immemorial the transient. The film is also considered important as one of the first to use a vertical wipe, in this case creating a cartoon-like effect, as Mary Jane nudges the audience as she holds a can with 'PARAFFIN' written in huge letters (a joke borrowed by Beckett over fifty years later in his 'Act Without Words').<br /><br />Perhaps even more intriguing than the film's formal originality is the ambiguity of the content. It seems to be a demonisation of women, of the new Woman or Suffragette, who was demanding the vote at this time in Britain, and victim of all kinds of establishment hatred and ridicule. This film seems to conflate two very real fears of the establishment - women and the working class - who, enfranchised, could have caused great damage to the status quo.<br /><br />Before her accident, Mary Jane is messing around the kitchen, and gets some soot above her lip, creating a moustache, to her delight, as she looks in a very Lacanian mirror. The message is clear - women just want to be men, and steal their power: the result is the destruction of the home, either deliberately or through non-masculine incompetence. Against a gorgeous, 'Caligari'-bleached backdrop, Mary Jane is buried, 'rest in pieces', her class and gender roles shattered, as conservatives wag their fingers at her grave, warning of the dangers of giving women any kind of responsibility.<br /><br />But Mary Jane has the last laugh, and rises from the dead to cause further havoc - Smith taking Freud's ideas about repression and applying them to the social context - the more you try to keep people down, the more they'll come back at you. The fact that the 'patriarchal' figure of the director uses his wife to tell this story is all the more remarkable.