Ella Cinders. 1926. Directed by Alfred E. Green.

(3/19/00)

What a delight this movie is! It is witty, entertaining and has heart to spare. It is a modern riff on the Cinderella story with Colleen Moore as a put-upon stepdaughter who wins a contest and gets to go to Hollywood.

I don't find Miss Moore particularly attractive, but she is thoroughly likable. You reallywant her to succeed. And she is a damn good comedienne to boot. She reminds me of Charlie Chaplin, but that could be because she's doing similar material. When she babysits she does a routine that is kind of remisiscent of Chaplin's "Dance of the Rolls" from The Gold Rush (released only the year before). And the scene where she sits for a photographer while a fly crawls on her nose is pretty Chaplin-like, too. But she does it so well.

Moore's Ella Cinders is plucky and resourceful. She never quits trying and her success is deserved. Even when she learns that the contest she won was a fraud and the perpetrators arrested she doesn't give up and go home. She persists in trying to get into the movies--and dammit, she does!

One great comic scene that I can't pass over is when Moore sleeps on the train in a deserted car--deserted, that is, until a tribe of Indians come on board. She wakes up and looks at them in disbelief. They are all smoking cigars and one is rather aggressively pressed upon her. She is afraid to turn it down even though it is making her obviously sick. It's a cruel scene, really--but funny!

Like Chaplin's films, this one has its share of pathos. Itisn't pathetic at first when Ella is being treated like a slave. That is played too broadly to be taken seriously. But when Ella is sitting alone at the curb, not being allowed to go to the ball; when the stepmother says "But I have no other daughter" when the judges come to give Ella the prize; when she goes to say goodbye to her stepmother and stepsisters before leaving for Hollywood and they just ignore her; and especially when she finds out that the contest she won wasn't genuine there is real pain.
If there is one thing I didn't like about this picture, it was that the ending seemed too abrupt. Her boyfriend arrives on a train and scoops her away from her work, not even really asking her to choose between him and a career. It just came out of nowhere and didn't work for me. But that's about the only thing I didn't like in this otherwise splendid movie. It's a gem.

(3/26/00)

I'd like to make note of a few more things about Ella Cinders that I found interesting. When she decides to enter the local contest in hopes of going to Hollywood, Ella surreptitiously borrows a book to learn the craft of acting for the pictures. In order to get the money to have her photos taken she babysits for three nights. These are just examples of the effort she puts out. She's really trying.

As she studies the book she tries to learn hopw to use her eyes and there is a hilarious and technically amazing scene of her making her eyes go in different directions. It is quite an advanced use of special effects.

And when determined Ella tries to crash into a movie studio, one of the things she tries is holding a mannequin's head above her own and draping herself in some very tall clothing and just casually walking through the studio gates. And it might have worked except for an overly aggressive dog that pulls that elongated dress right off.