Cinderella (1914)
Released 28th December 1914
Cinderella marked husband and wife Owen Moore and Mary Pickford’s first collaboration since Pickford signed for Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players. The actress often demanded roles for family members in her pictures, and it is likely she helped to secure Moore the part of Prince Charming opposite her. They wed in secret in January 1911, but already their marriage was in trouble. Rumours suggested Pickford had an abortion early in their marriage, which left her sterile – such a trauma must have placed a strain on the young couple. Although Pickford eventually confessed their wedlock to her family, it was rarely publicised – Charlotte felt it could harm Pickford’s image and career.
Although she kept her silence until many years later, Pickford felt her husband was to blame for the poor quality of her films at IMP, where he argued with Thomas Ince about his direction. When she broke her contract with Carl Laemmle, she moved to Majestic, where Moore got to direct his wife, but she was unhappy with the results. Disliked by Pickford’s domineering mother, Charlotte, Moore found himself virtually ostracised – a situation that caused him to plunge even deeper into the bottle of which he was so fond.
Pickford told the story of an actor friend in 1916 whom she called Frank, but who was clearly her own husband: “No longer was he the happy-go-lucky, carefree boy who had courted the obscure little actress… He was really as negative in his own home as the furniture, and it was not often he could see his wife, so surrounded was she by the admiring public, clamoring managers and the press. One never hears of Frank these days. No one asks what he is doing. ‘I am just the shadow,’ he said to me the other day, ‘the shadow thrown by a great, scintillating light.’”
In early 1914, Pickford turned for solace to the handsome former actor turned director James Kirkwood, whom she had known since their earliest days at Biograph, and who directed the married couple in Cinderella. Kirkwood was also a heavy drinker, often in the company of Pickford’s dissolute little brother, Jack, but possessed an easy-going charm her husband lacked. Kirkwood’s son, a successful novelist and playwright, recalled, “My father always said that he adored her, that he was very much in love with her and they had a lovely relationship…He even spoke about a time when they were very close to being married.” Pickford said of the man who directed her in nine pictures in the two-year period 1914-1915, “I adored Jim Kirkwood. He was such fun, and a lot like Mickey Neilan. I suppose that is why he and Mickey were such pals. They worked hard, and they played hard – and they loved life. There will never be another pair like those two.”
It seems odd that Famous Players chose Kirkwood to direct the man whom he was cuckolding, but Kirkwood Jr. said, “My dad liked Owen Moore, and he liked Owen’s brother Matt, too. He liked Douglas Fairbanks as well. These men were all very strange about cuckolding each other. They seemed glad to bed each other’s wives and girlfriends. There was no animosity or one-upmanship. If you could spirit her off to bed, it was fine. No hard feelings.”
Kirkwood was the kind of man who appealed to Pickford: confident, brash, bold. He also knew how to handle the sometimes-temperamental actress on set. He kept the atmosphere easy-going, and when he required tears from his leading lady, he would sit with her and recall some sad event from her past. When a lighter tone was required, he kidded her about happy times. Sometimes he would taunt her into a rage, much as Griffith had done at Biograph – but in a way that ensured Pickford directed her rage towards the camera.
The absence of sound gives all silent films a dreamlike quality, so a whimsical fairy tale would seem to be an ideal subject for a maturing industry still bewitched by the wizardry of special effects. Cinderella had been filmed at least five times before James Kirkwood directed this version. Renowned cinema magician George Melies had already filmed it twice. The story of an oppressed young woman overcoming impoverishment and adversity was also one that fitted both Pickford’s professional and personal profile. It’s disappointing, then, that her version of Cinderella is a disappointment. That’s not to say it’s a poor film – it’s just an acceptable one that could have been amazing.
Much of the blame lies at Kirkwood’s feet. For all its special effects – and there are many – there’s a prosaic feel to his treatment of the tale. Not only is the camera static, it remains glued to the spot for repeated visits to the same locations. It sometimes feels as if one is watching a film made half-a-decade earlier.
Pickford is as good as you’d expect, receiving most of the close-ups, conveying Cinderella’s inner thoughts with no over-emphasis of expression or movement. Owen Moore looks the part of Prince Charming opposite her but possesses only modest reserves of the quality that gives the character he plays his name.
Ironically, Cinderella is at its most engaging when it departs from the Charles Perrault fairy tale that inspired it. The wicked stepsisters visit a fortune teller – a witch who lives in a cave with dancing dwarfs – who correctly foretells that a member of the household will marry the prince. Their visit is preceded by a title that proclaims them ‘ignorant and superstitious’, contrasting their behaviour with Cinderella’s ‘faith and prayer,’ an example of the religious message found in so many silent movies. Cinderella and the Prince also have a woodland encounter before the ball, which adds a little depth to their romance, something which is absent from Kirkwood’s shallow treatment of most other aspects of the tale. He does, however, add some welcome touches of humour, such as the curious Cinderella’s tentative prodding of a coachman to check he is real, and a dream sequence in which two dwarfs hammer each other over the head in front of a wildly spinning clock.
Variety dismissed the film: “In these days of feature film making, one naturally expects a lot for his money, particularly when comparison is inevitably drawn with previous productions. When the Famous Players announced a feature production of Cinderella it would be expected it would be something out of the ordinary...The photography is bad. The picture from every standpoint, and especially what was expected of it, is a disappointment. Much of it gives the impression that the camera had been placed a long way from the actors. Cinderella may please the kids, but the adults will likely have a different opinion.”