Director: Alfred E. Green
Cast: Colleen Moore, Lloyd Hughes, Vera Lewis, Doris Baker
Have I Seen it Before: Never. I tell my wife the title of the movie after I saw it, and she immediately noted a modern (for 1926) re-telling of the Cinderella. I’ll admit it took me the better part of twenty minutes, and I had to keep myself from bellowing “Oh…” when it finally came to me.
Did I Like It: All movies are comic books now, and things were way different back in the day.
Ho-hum. We’ve been peeling ink from the funny pages with our cinema cameras like it was always so much mechanized silly putty since before we cracked the notion of syncronized sound.
I’ve had a bit of crisis of faith with silent cinema as of late. Having to sit through an army of turgid westerns and saccharine romantic epics that I had to wonder if nitrate decay had some sort of sinister need to spare the patience-testing and destroy the real gems. That may yet prove to be true in the aggregate, but at least this buoyed my spirits. I’m certainly more convinced than ever that horror and comedy are the two genres that age the best in these cases. Both are concerned with basic, less-than-intellecutal reactions. Shadows can become inhuman like in Metropolis (1927), and a chill goes down one’s spine. Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin can embrace their purer clown, and if I’m still laughing, the century between myself and the film is merely a number.
So, here, I chuckled at a number of spots. Moore might not be remembered as much as some of her masculine peers, but she knows how to work with her face and the camera to elicit the laughs. Sure, the entire plot—such as it is—falls apart the moment a marriage proposal comes into play, but as I mentioned above: I felt the feeling for which the filmmakers aimed. Mission accomplished.