By Scott Ross
Recently, watching the luscious Blu-ray edition of the 1950 Walt Disney Cinderella, it struck me that it might be time to re-view the two best live-action versions I know of this ancient tale whose roots stretch back at least to the earliest Christian era and which has informed so much popular culture throughout the world, particularly in the west. While the 1950 Walt Disney animated version still seems to me the finest of all (the phrase “fairest of them all” belongs to another fairy tale given memorable4 life by Disney) there is so much to cherish in the other two they can hardly be considered also-rans.
First, the 1957 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II live television production starring the newly-minted Broadway star Julie Andrews, then firmly ensconced as Eliza Dolittle in the defining work of the era’s other preeminent team — at least until the advent, with Fiorello!, of Bock and Harnick — Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. “Cinderella” is very much a Broadway production, peopled by New York actors, designers and musical personnel, with some of the performers, in order to participate, taking time off the hit shows in which they were starred, Andrews from Fair Lady and the Fairy Godmother, Edie Adams, from Li’l Abner. Although it was broadcast in color, as with so many live television shows for which a kinescope survives, the video we are left with is in black-and-white. (It’s actually not the live broadcast but a kinescope of the dress rehearsal.) Still, while it would be lovely to see those sets and costumes in color, the show (or rather, the score) is the thing here, and it’s a charmer. Hammerstein gave it one funny number, the “Stepsisters’ Lament” performed with comic brio by the dour Alice Ghostly (as the sister hilariously named “Joy”) and a comedically braying Kaye Ballard, and in the somewhat repetitious “Impossible”/”It’s Possible,” Adams gets one of those sunny little releases that were almost a trademark of Hammerstein’s and which like the lyrics in “Getting to Know You” by the weird alchemy of his craft almost seem to have been a part of the popular language forever:
But the world is full of zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules
And won’t believe what sensible people say,
And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes,
Impossible things are happ’ning every day!
Copyright © 2013, 1957 by Oscar Hammerstein II
Copyright Renewed, Williamson Music Company (ASCAP), c/o Concord Music Publishing
Similarly, the love-duet for Cinderella and the Prince, “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” is among those achingly perfect songs with which the R&H catalogue brims and which came with such astonishing regularity throughout their work, both together and apart. (Hammerstein’s dialogue for the pair is also remarkably intelligent.) My only complaint about the score is that there is among these lovely numbers a slight lack of variety, so that as one charm-song follows another you may long for something satirical like “How Can Love Survive?” or “No Way to Stop it,” the two best songs in the original The Sound of Music, neither of which made it to the movie. (The former is heard at the Von Trapp party, but as an instrumental.) But then, Rodgers’ music, for all its variety of styles, is seldom raucous or messily alive the way other composers’ routinely are. There’s something a little staid about his scores with Hammerstein, and even the greatest of them, like Carousel and The King and I, can feel a bit constricted musically. Only South Pacific is contemporary and feels like it.
The show is beautifully cast, with Andrews a practical and sweet-natured Cinderella, Howard Lindsay an amusing old fusspot of a king and the adorable Dorothy Stickney an enchanting queen, giving those who never saw them in it an idea of what they might have been like in Life with Father. Ilka Chase makes a flinty but not especially cruel Stepmother and Jon Cypher, remembered by viewers of my generation as the Chief of Police on “Hill Street Blues” with whom Daniel J. Travanti’s Frank Furillo so often sparred, almost makes the Prince less thankless a role than usual and is in splendid voice throughout. (He also has the show’s only noticeable flub when in the reprise of “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” he steps on Stickney’s lyric, about which he was miserable and she entirely unruffled.)
I was not surprised to hear one of the cast members on the Shout! DVD (I think it was Andrews, although it might have been Ballard) say that the set was cramped, and you can see that it must have been, made up as it is of so many smaller playing areas, but the designs by Jean Eckart and William Eckart are beautiful, as are her costumes. Ralph Nelson directed the show with unhurried efficiency given the monumental task and Rodgers’ music was orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett with his usual subtle brilliance. Bennett, who often composed more than was suspected of the scores he arranged for Rodgers, Cole Porter and others, was one of the six or seven finest orchestrators in Broadway history — Jonathan Tunick to Rodgers’ Stephen Sondheim. Half the reason a Rodgers waltz or ballad sounds like one is due to him.
Of historical note: Presumably on the strength of the names Rodgers and Hammerstein, the “Cinderella” broadcast had the highest rating of any television program up to that time; Jon Cypher said that after the broadcast the New York streets were weirdly deserted, and it’s been estimated that of 167 million Americans in 1957, over 107 million tuned in. Not even the “M*A*S*H” finale, the reigning champion in the series episode field, drew that large a viewership. Let’s see Lin-Manuel Miranda top that.
Music is also the great strength, and weakness, of Richard B. Sherman and Robert M. Sherman’s The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella (1976). Strength because the score is one of the Shermans’ finest for movies, on a par with the work they did on Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. The only problem with the songs, which are on the whole either beautiful, delightful or both, is that as production numbers they tend to go on far too long. The picture, which weighs in at a hefty 143 minutes, could stand to lose a few, and the dances are what should have gone. Not all the dancing, of course, but the extraneous ensemble dancing, which seldom has anything to do with the scene or the song and at their nadir (in the otherwise apt “Position and Positioning”) resemble that terrible “Consider Yourself” number of Onna White’s in the movie of Oliver!, with the performers dancing their little hearts out for absolutely no reason. In their duet “What a Comforting Thing to Know,” the Prince (Richard Chamberlain) and his bodyguard (Christopher Gable) do acrobatics in a crypt, where metal pipes have been fitted above the sepulchres, apparently solely for them to swing on. The only extended dance that has a purpose, and some wit, is when the King (Michael Hordern) and his cabinet of pompous old ministers perform the typically Shermanian “Protocoligorically Correct” and launch into a funny kick-line atop the long table. What surprises me about the superfluous dances is that they were the work of Marc Breaux, who with his wife Dee Dee Wood created the often inspired and in any case always appropriate choreography in Poppins, The Sound of Music and Bedknobs — their extended Portobello Road number, stupidly cut from the release in 1973 and restored to home video, is the sort of ensemble work movie musicals often aspire to but seldom achieve and even in lesser pictures like The Happiest Millionaire and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang the Breaux-Wood dances spring wholly from the content of the song. Here the numbers seem to exist because The Slipper and the Rose is a musical and in musicals you dance… right?
I was predisposed to enjoy The Slipper and the Rose because both its score and its original screenplay were written by the Sherman brothers, but on seeing it for the first time a decade ago I was entirely un-prepared, in spite of my cavils about the dances, for how utterly charming it is. (It even ends with old-fashioned curtain calls for the cast.) The movie’s origins are made a bit muddy by the director and co-scenarist Bryan Forbes’ commentary on the Blu-ray in which he implies he wrote the first screenplay and the interview with Richard and Robert Sherman in which they talk about it being their idea, and their original script, long before Forbes was involved. I suspect the Sherman brothers wrote it and that Forbes then revised it, making it more “English” in outlook and dialogue. It was certainly the Shermans who decided to refract the familiar story largely through the Prince’s perspective, and it was a perfect stroke. In nearly every other version of Cinderella, the Prince is — and this is not a pun on the last name of Julie Andrews’ consort from 1957 — a cipher, barely defined, who literally waltzes in at the ball, is left holding a glass slipper afterward, and re-emerges only at the end, having married his instant dream-girl.
One of the things the Shermans seldom get credit for — and there is much they get no credit for — is their sureness of touch. They were always conscious of content, form and style; the essentials. They understood time, place, who was singing, what they were trying to say, and why. They understood as well the means by which a song became necessary. Finally, they understood, and were masters at, musicality. (I assume, despite the team’s billing, that it was Richard, the trained musician, who did most of the composing, but since their credit was always as co-composers as well as co-lyricists, I will leave it at that.) In Mary Poppins, for example, they caught, as did Lerner and Loewe before them in the Convent Garden and Alfred Doolittle numbers in My Fair Lady, the exact, quintessential English music hall/busker style, for Bert and for the “Jolly Holiday” sequence. That facility for effective pastiche, one which sets them apart as musical dramatists, in this picture is perhaps the most fully realized of all their work for movies. Much of the score is operetta-style filtered through a modern idiom, with rich, fulsome parodies of the Graustarkian tropes and nods to Gilbert and Sullivan. It’s simultaneously thoroughly European, utterly British, and distinctly Sherman.
Of the three musicals considered in this essay, The Slipper and the Rose is in its score the most accomplished and sophisticated. (Even the Disney Cinderella, whose brief song score feels more varied than the Rodgers and Hammerstein, isn’t as fully realized as this.) Interestingly and in keeping with the Shermans’ means of telling the story, it is the Prince, not Cinderella, who gets the traditional musical theatre “want song” at the beginning, and the fantasy he imagines in it (“Why Can’t I Be Two People?”) is of course mirrored perfectly when Cinderella arrives at the ball disguised as a titled lady. Her establishing song, “Once I Was Loved,” on the other hand, sung after the death of her father, while melancholy is both resigned and gently defiant. The King’s stylish gavotte, “Protocoligorically Correct,” is hinged on the Shermans’ requisite coinage of a whimsical portmanteau neologism. The love song at the ball, “Secret Kingdom,” is one of the most memorable of all Sherman ballads, with a deceptively simple melody that can stick in your mind indefinitely, and in the most pleasing manner. This is followed by a splendid double soliloquy (“He Danced with Me/She Danced with Me”) that is both lilting and exhilarating. (At the Command Performance the Queen Mother told the songwriters she’d never heard a more beautiful waltz. But then, the Windsors are scarcely noted for their musical perspicacity. Maybe it was the movie’s evocation of royal prerogative that got to her.)
The masterpiece of this score occurs in its most dramatic moment when to save the crown embarrassment the Lord High Chamberlain urges Cinderella into exile and she, out of love, accepts. “Tell Him Anything” expresses her determination that her prince should, to save him from pining after her, believe anything negative about her except the truth: That she is true to him. The dark, swirling musical accompaniment and the deeply intelligent lyrics with their adroit inner rhymes combine to make a number that is moving and plangent without resort to bathos or emotionalism, and when Cinderella sings, “Tell him anything/But not that I love him” the music’s roiling, agitated state slowly resolves, sadly yet somehow rhapsodically. This is the furthest thing from the sort of cookie-cutter writing original movie musicals so often make do with, in which commonplace emotions are met with generic composition and lyric-writing and which we grudgingly accept because the performers are charming, or the dance they’re doing has some originality or wit. Whenever I hear “Tell Him Anything” I think of Sondheim because it sounds like the sort of thing he might have come up with but which almost none of the people who habitually dismiss them ever expect of the Shermans.
Richard Chamberlain is both in gorgeous fettle and beautiful voice as the Prince, the wonderful Michael Hordern does one of his comic specialties as the dithering king (“Kings never cheat! They adapt to circumstances. But they never cheat!”), Lally Bowers makes a charmingly ditzy queen, Annette Crosbie is captivatingly loopy as the fairy godmother, Kenneth Moore is both pompous and unexpectedly moving as the lord chamberlain, Edith Evans very amusing as the dowager queen (making me wonder what she would have been like in A Little Night Music, had Sondheim and Hal Prince gotten her as they’d wanted), Margaret Lockwood a remorselessly wicked stepmother and Gemma Craven an adorable and vocally glorious Cinderella. Forbes directed in his usual uninspired and realistic fashion, which in a curious way grounds the magical components; there are no big effects, just lovely images with a slight aspect of magic. Each time some supernatural element is released it’s either done in an almost prosaic manner, making the magical quotidian (and vice-versa) or with subtle cuts that work their own legerdemain, as when Cinderella rushes from the palace, gradually losing her finery and returning to her normal state of dress.
Tony Imi’s sumptuous color cinematography is an asset, as are Angela Morley’s musical arrangements and, operating on a minimal budget, the production design of Raymond Simm, the art direction by Bert Davey and, especially, Julie Harris’ lush costumes, which reach their apogee in the ball sequence, designed and executed in subtle, mouth-watering pastels. One might cavil that in the sequence late in the picture where Cinderella sings the rueful “I Can’t Forget the Melody,” the imagery is a nearly exact duplicate of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “L’Escarpolette” and thus more than a bit studied, but what bothers me most about it is that the sumptuous costuming and decor seem entirely out of character for Cinderella, even if the royals are footing her bills. This is the price one pays when a director becomes determined to create a visual effect for its own sake (and for his own obsessive reasons) regardless of whether it makes any sense for the movie he’s making.
In spite of that notable lapse on Forbes’ part, however, I was flabbergasted to read in his Movies on TV this comment by Steven M. Scheuer: “An air of desperation hangs over everything.” What movie did he see? The thing is so sure-footed, so beautiful, so entrancing, and so casually magical that “desperation” is the last word I can imagine using to describe it.
As Crosbie’s Fairy Godmother assures Cinderella before her appearance at the ball: “No one will recognize you for what you are. People seldom do.”
The original Disney Cinderella was, I think, the first movie my sister and I were taken to a theater to see, on its 1965 reissue. I certainly remember seeing it, and being given the Gold Key comic book reprint that summer as part of my reading material (or perusing, at any rate; I was only 4-and-a-half) during the family’s annual auto trip to Florida to visit our maternal grandparents. My sibling received the “Magic Mirror” Disneyland LP for her birthday that year, but I suspect I listened to it more often than she did; I loved the sped-up voices of the mice singing the “Work Song” and their own version of “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” as well as “So This is Love,” the brief, curiously and effectively low-key (and minor-keyed) duet for the Prince and Cinderella at the ball… although what I chiefly remembered from the movie itself were the King and the Grand Duke bouncing into the air on the monarch’s absurdly enormous mattress. What child of four couldn’t envy their being able to bounce on that bed, fly practically to the castle ceiling, and float safely back down? Never mind that the King is doing his best to decapitate the Duke; it was the bouncing that mattered.*
Cinderella was Disney’s savior in 1950, when after years of dismal featurettes and make-work government contracts the studio was facing a financial reckoning, and the possible dissolution of its animation unit, the bedrock on which Walt had built the company. Perhaps to keep the costs down, the picture isn’t as visually impressive as some of its predecessors (and successors) and the song score is one of the studio’s briefest. Although Disney’s animated features are not, strictly speaking, full musicals on the same scale as their Broadway and East End counterparts — until Babes in Toyland and Mary Poppins Disney pictures were more full-length stories with a few songs — they’re still musicals. Cinderella‘s song-stack is roughly on a par with that in Snow White or Pinocchio, or the similarly minimalist Dumbo. There are only four major melodies (“So This is Love,” “Sing, Sweet Nightingale,” “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” and “A Dream…”) plus a fractional fifth (the “Work Song”) which segues into the murine edition of “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” a number I can never contemplate without remembering the “Fresh Air” Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz relating that a friend of his had once called it the most frightening title he’d ever heard.† Its lyrical relation to “When You Wish Upon a Star” doesn’t bear too close a comparison either, although I do like the couplet “Have faith in your dreams and someday/Your rainbow will come smiling through,” which whatever you think of its oversold optimism is a nice piece of minor poetry. I’m not sure, speaking of this score, what astonishes me most: That all of its songs were by the same three-man team (Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman), that the only other number they ever placed for a Disney picture was “The Un-Birthday Song” in Alice in Wonderland, or that Hoffman and Livingston also wrote “Mairzy Doats.”
In adapting Charles Perrault’s version of the Giambattista Basile story, it was a smart idea of the Disney writers (who included Bill Peet, Ted Sears, Ken Anderson, Winston Hibler and Joe Rinaldi) to focus much of the humor, and the suspense, of the picture on Cinderella’s mice. In classical versions of the story it’s birds who come to the slave-girl’s aid but small birds don’t have the capacity for stealth that mice do, or a place inside a mansion’s walls, and pitting the mice against the Stepmother’s evil, pampered cat (not incidentally named Lucifer) is an inspired stroke. Of the three versions of Cinderella written about here, only the Disney edition has a firm and elaborate visual grasp on fantasy, and the means (animation) by which to best express it. Additionally, and unlike almost all recent Mouse House product, schizophrenically made with one eye on each new heroine’s spunky feminist/”Woke” bona fides and the other on crafting an ageless new “Princess” to add to the marketing lineage, there was no art-by-committee finagling in 1949; generations of girls and boys loved this Cinderella for her natural ebullience, her love of animals, and her complete lack of self-pity. (Would they have loved her quite so much if she’d also been carrying banners?) It’s that last item that makes the treatment of her before the ball by her step-family so horrific, and her reaction to it so harrowing: Having her dress, lovingly augmented by her mice and bird friends, torn to ribbons also shreds her ability to believe; when she runs out to the garden weeping, her faith in dreams shattered, she thinks, beyond repair, it’s heart-rending. Yet the slow gathering around her of the mice, the bloodhound Bruno and the draft-horse Major, drawn by her uncharacteristic outpouring of pain and need, suggest the deep love she conveys to them, and that they feel for her, and it is this as much as the unexpected appearance of Cinderella’s kindly Fairy Godmother that makes it such a heartfelt and memorable sequence. Here too the music does wonders to convey the dramatic intensity of the scene, the chorus singing back her own words (“Have faith in your dreams, and someday…”) which Cinderella now fights against, thinking herself a fool for that belief.
Cinderella’s despair represents the moment when even she, for all her sunniness and optimism, reaches the end of her ability to take the abuse her stepsisters dole out to her. Yet as vicious as the girls are (and as physically repulsive — their animator, Ollie Johnson, really lays on their ugliness) they take their cues from the truly horrid Lady Tremaine, the Frank Thomas-animated stepmother both modeled on the physiognomy of the actress Eleanor Audley and memorably voiced by her. Audley later inspired the design of, and provided the voice for, Maleficent in the 1959 Sleeping Beauty, but even that evil fairy and erstwhile fire-breathing dragon is not as nasty, or as frightening to a child, as Lady Tremaine, and Thomas’ rendering of her is a tour de force of symbolized character animation, as when she is shown obliquely through the shadows of her huge canopy bed, giving increasingly onerous cleaning instructions to her stepdaughter with a brutality that is almost shocking in its undisguised psychosis. She’s like a large animal of prey, revealing her teeth in a hideous smile. Although Margaret Lockwood in The Slipper and the Rose is also vicious, of all the Wicked Stepmothers in this survey Lady Tremaine is the one who seems most likely to one day draw real blood. If she hasn’t already.
Cinderella, as was often the case with Disney’s feature animation, benefited from live-action reference — which is not the same thing as rotoscoping — and Helene Stanley was the perfect model for the girl, graceful without becoming a caricature of grace, while Ilene Woods’ unemphatic vocal performance, which includes both her speaking and her singing, makes her among the most winning of all Disney heroines. Thanks to the then-new technique of over-dubbing pioneered by Les Paul, Disney was able to produce the gorgeous sequence in which a growing series of bubble reflections of Cinderella replicate her vocalizations as she rescues the voice-and-flute exercise “Sing, Sweet Nightingale” from the clutches of her tone-deaf stepsisters while scrubbing the Tremaine mansion’s vast hall floor. The sound of her voice going from solo to duet to trio to quartet is not merely a clever touch, or a pleasing musical number but a perfect representation of character. Faced with pointless labor imposed on her by a practiced sadist, the girl’s outlook somehow remains cheerful. Neither is she a happy idiot grinning at adversity; her character — gentle, optimistic, dreamy yet not insipid — is as fixed in Cinderella as Lady Tremaine’s genteel savagery is in her.
All of Disney’s “Nine Old Men” (Johnston, Thomas, Marc Davis, Eric Larson, Les Clark, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, John Lounsbery and Wolfgang Reitherman) worked on the picture, which I feel certain, accounted at least in part for its specialness. Davis’ design of Cinderella, and his work animating her, informs our impressions; his brief sequence of transformation, in which her rags become a resplendent ball gown, is among the most magical such moments in American animation. Fortunately, the people of 1950, both those who worked on this movie and the audience for it, didn’t demand that a fairy tale character, whose fullest flowering was in Europe, earn her studio ESG points or a high social-credit score. They understood implicitly that the leading character in a story derived from a French fable would be Caucasian, and that her being white was not a deliberate snub to any other group. (Christ, but I get tired of this game, and of wondering whether new readers of these pages do or do not automatically presume I’m some sort of bigot for my enjoyment of yet another old movie with no inherent prejudices except that of trying to entertain the largest possible audience of its time. Why do I get the feeling that merely liking these versions of Cinderella automatically puts me — if you’ll forgive the pun — beyond the pale?)
Kahl was responsible for the direction of the childishly mercurial King, his milquetoast Grand Duke and, most memorably, for the design and animation of the soft, kind, lovely old Fairy Godmother, modeled on Mary Alice O’Connor and beautifully voiced by Verna Felton, while Kimball, Reitherman and Lounsbery supervised the animation of the mouse heroes Jaq and Gus. Reitherman, whose special forte was action, animated the almost excruciatingly tense sequence of Jaq and Gus retrieving the key to Cinderella’s room and dragging it up the attic stairs. (The special-effects man Jimmy MacDonald, Walt’s replacement as the voice of Mickey Mouse, had his recordings sped up for both Jaq and Gus.) Larson and Clark are credited as the pictures’ supervising animators and the overall directors were Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske and Clyde Geronimi. Kimball also worked on Lucifer and provided the great moment when, realizing he’s trapped Gus under a teacup, the cat sticks out his tongue and waves his paws around in a crazy parody of feline ecstasy.
Speaking of Lucifer: There’s a disturbing moment near then end when, chased to the upper window outside Cinderella’s tower bedroom by Bruno, he falls, presumably to his death. I wonder why I didn’t remember that from childhood? Perhaps I blocked it.
As always with Disney, it’s the small things that resonate with you, and which add to your pleasure. When, after her midnight escape from the ball Cinderella explains to her animal friends how it felt to dance with the Prince, Gus leans in against Jaq in second-hand romantic bliss and Jaq, without thinking, places his arm around the rotund mouse and holds him close before coming to his senses and glaring at his friend in annoyance. Naturally, literalists now see in this charming, harmless moment of amusement a declaration of sexuality; according to the understandably pseudonymous “A.X.S,” writing speciously in The Economist, these characters are “not so much gay as queer,” while The Disney Company itself in its needless live-action 2015 “remake” of Cinderella, turned Jaq into “Jacqueline” because God forbid female fantasy mice behave in a traditional manner in a goddamned fairy tale. The sex-change (if you’ll pardon the expression) also got around that pesky little homoerotic joke of 1950, thus perfectly illustrating how Disney, currently embroiled in a pointless controversy with the governor of Florida over, among other things, an educational bill deliberately misinterpreted and cynically mis-named by the reactive “Woke,” likes to play things both ways.
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
*Most Disney Princes are colorless, but the one in Cinderella is barely even there. If it wasn’t for “So This is Love” (in which his singing was provided by Mike Douglas) he’d have no dimensions at all.
†A sixth number, “Cinderella,” is heard beneath the main titles, but apart from its being sung by Marni Nixon (as herself for once) it’s a bore.
So few critics, so many poets 