Now You See It is a 1947 short film (ten minutes) directed by Richard L. Cassell.
It was produced by Pete Smith as one of his Pete Smith Specialties, a long-running series of MGM shorts. In this one, Smith, who narrates as always, demonstrates the wonders of magnification and extreme close-up photography. The short opens with a shot of a gear wheel turning, as Smith asks the audience if it is part of some industrial machine. After demonstrating that in fact it's part of the gear of a wristwatch, Smith demonstrates how the wristwatch works. Then he turns to the world of nature, showing a series of close-ups and slow motion shots, of a newly-hatched hummingbird and a series of insects.
Tropes:
- Added Alliterative Appeal: Smith shows the gear that controls the actual timekeeping on the watch, and describes it as "the tiny ticker," shown through the "ticklish technique" of cinematography, and how up-close it looks like "a massive multipartite mechanism."
- Ambiguous Syntax: After opening with the close-up of the gear, Smith cuts to a long shot to reveal that it's a gear from "a tiny woman's wristwatch. Ok, ok, so it isn't a tiny woman's wristwatch. It's a woman's tiny wristwatch. So I'll be grammatical if it kills me."
- Bizarre Alien Senses: After demonstrating that a fly's eye actually consists of hundreds of tiny eyes, Smith tries to suggest what a fly sees by filling the screen with dozens of tiny identical pictures of a woman holding a fly swatter.
- Born in the Theater: Smith addresses his audience as "Dear cash customers. And bless you, every one."
- Extreme Close-Up: Extreme close-ups give the audience a new perspective on the world of very tiny objects.
- Narrator: Pete Smith as always, with his usual droll, nasal narration.
- Nature Documentary: After the intro with the wristwatch, Smith sticks to the world of nature. He shows a mosquito hatching from an egg, and reveals that a cat's tongue is rough because it's actually covered with a lot of tiny hooks.
- Undercrank: As the film shows a mosquito hatching from its egg, Smith says that the camera has been sped up to make the action quicker.
