‘Cinderella’, a tale which in Perrault, Grimm, pantomime, and modernized versions has inspired film‐makers for a hundred years, beginning with Méliès in 1899. Over 50 of the adaptations have borne the name ‘Cinderella’ (or the equivalent in another language, e.g. ‘Cendrillon’ or ‘Aschenputtel’); some of the titles offer playful variations such as Cinderfella; a third group invoke fairy‐tale iconography (The Slipper and the Rose) or phraseology (Ever After) in their names. The films that update the story normally reduce magic to the status of chance, charm, or dream and replace majesty by money.
Christmas 1914 saw Mary Pickford, well on her way to becoming ‘the world's sweetheart’, star as Cinderella in a sumptuous high‐budget version derived from traditional pantomime, with the sisters presented as ugly and comic. Early in the 1920s, by contrast, Lotte Reiniger produced a short and simple Grimm‐based Cinderella out of scissors and cardboard.
After that, for over two decades, modernized versions held sway. From the makers of Peter Pan came another Barrie adaptation, A Kiss for Cinderella (USA, 1926). Set in London during the air raids of World War I, it presents a lodging‐house skivvy as Cinderella, a compassionate policeman as the prince, and a harsh landlady as one of the ugly sisters. Cinderella's visit to the palace takes place within a dream she has while sitting on a doorstep in a snowstorm. A year later the comedienne Colleen Moore was Ella Cinders (USA, 1927). This satirizes film studios through showing how the dowdy drudge Ella wins a beauty contest by mistake, wreaks havoc in Hollywood, and marries a millionaire football player. A third updating, First Love (USA, 1939), features the young singing star Deanna Durbin as an orphan who, by virtue of having won the hearts of the servants in her uncle's house, drives in style to the ball with a police escort, and marries into money.
In the 1950s, magic came back. Disney's Cinderella (USA, 1950) exploited animation's capacity to effect a seamless pumpkin transformation. In the main it follows Perrault even though, while researching the story's sources, Disney learned that Perrault had misheard ‘vair’ as ‘verre’, which meant that Cinderella's slippers should really be made of fur, not glass. Disney, however, preferred to stick with Perrault, and put the fragility of glass to a dramatic use—the stepmother smashes the slipper into fragments before Cinderella can try it on—that the flexibility of fur would not have allowed. Overall, Disney expands seven pages into 75 minutes, with the mice in particular getting greatly enlarged roles: in Perrault they do nothing except turn into horses and pull Cinderella's coach, whereas in Disney two of them have rounded characters and interact with Cinderella throughout the film. Another change is that Disney rejects Perrault's choice of a rat as coachman and lizards as footmen, preferring to use homelier animals—a horse and a dog—for those purposes.
Most major adaptations since then have followed Disney in finding or creating situations ripe for enhancement by music. Set in the early 19th century, The Glass Slipper (USA, 1954) contains not only songs but also sequences in which Leslie Caron, as Ella, dances with the Ballet de Paris. This version does not set out to create narrative tension; rather, it defuses it by having the Prince know all about Ella before inviting her to the ball. With similar effect, Ella's midnight flight is caused not by the imminent disappearance of her finery, but by the fact that her coachman wants to be back home with his family by one o'clock. The focus is instead on Ella's psychology, on how long her spirit can remain unbowed by oppression, on what is real and what is only in her mind. In keeping with this, nothing happens through overt glittering magic: the godmother character, a whimsical, pixilated woman named Mrs Toquet, makes dreams come true by a practical approach, using things that come to hand in the kitchen.
The same decade gave birth to a full‐scale musical comedy Cinderella (USA, 1957), written for television by Rodgers and Hammerstein, following in the wake of such stage and movie successes as South Pacific and Oklahoma! The approach is essentially that of pantomime: the stepsisters are vain and repellent, the godmother is eccentric, the prince is charming. The whole production revolves round the songs, which explore the characters' situations. Cinderella sings about her repressed yearnings in ‘In My Own Little Corner’; her stepsisters give vent to their jealousy in ‘Stepsisters' Lament’; and Cinderella and the Prince together ask a question central to many fairy tales—‘Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful, Or Are You Beautiful Because I Love You?'
Another screen musical, The Slipper and the Rose (UK, 1976), sought to inject reality into the story, without abolishing magic, by taking it out of the studio and away from pantomime. The characters are presented as capable of change. As in both Grimm and Perrault, the stepsisters are attractive in physical appearance; only in their natures are they ugly. The actors, though not professionally trained, did their own singing; and the songs arise naturally from the situations. In ‘Why Can’t I Be Two People?', Prince Edward rails against the restrictions imposed on him by royal obligations; in reply the Chamberlain argues the importance of hierarchical distinction—‘Position and Positioning’. He fails to convince the prince, but later succeeds with Cinderella, persuading her that the prince cannot possibly marry a commoner. The fairy godmother thus has an extra problem to sort out.
In the 1990s the trend in screen Cinderellas has been towards contemporization—keeping the original setting, but injecting contemporary values. A 1997 revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein television version, with an amended screenplay and a multi‐ethnic cast, brings about a discussion between Cinderella and the Prince a few days before the ball. Wandering incognito through a market‐place on a meet‐the‐people excursion, he bumps into Cinderella. They talk, and without knowing who he is she asserts that she does not want to be treated like a princess—all she wants is the respect due to anyone. In similar vein the fairy godmother (Whitney Houston) insists that the transformative magic comes not from her wand, but from deep down in Cinderella's soul.
This overhauling continued in the non‐musical cinema feature Ever After: A Cinderella Story (USA, 1998) which sets its face against the notion that happiness equals marrying a rich man. The background is still class and castles, but the Cinderella character (Drew Barrymore) does not even start as a sooty victim. Feisty, self‐assertive, and able to carry the Prince on her back when necessary, she has no need of a spell‐casting godmother or a pumpkin‐turned‐coach or a particularly dainty foot.
After a century of screen adaptations, ‘Cinderella’ seems now to be a fairy tale without fairies.
— Terry Staples
