The Crazy Ray

The Crazy Ray (Paris qui dort, 1925) — watch online on iFILM — is René Clair's debut feature, shot in under three weeks on a bare-bones budget. A night watchman on the Eiffel Tower wakes to find all of Paris locked solid: pedestrians frozen mid-stride, cars stopped in the street, the whole city suspended like a photograph.

The handful of people still moving quickly realise that total freedom is a stranger kind of problem than it sounds. Clair turns the sci-fi premise into dry social comedy — what people actually do when rules vanish is the real subject. Stream The Crazy Ray (1925) on iFILM.