Rhapsodies

This week’s selection I’m calling musical Cinderella films. That is to say musical takes on the Cinderella story. (I was planning on calling it Cinderella musicals but one of them was dance numbers rather than singing.)

My first film Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (Peau d’Âne) tells the story of a Princess of a magical kingdom,(Catherine Deneuve), where all of the servants have blue skin and the kingdom’s source of revenue is a magical donkey that defecates riches. 

When his wife dies, the princess’s father the king vows to marry the first beautiful woman he sees. Regrettably, this is the princess. On her fairy god mother’s she tries to avoid the incest by stalling as best she can by asking her father for impossible gifts. Unfortunately, he manages to provide each item. When her final gambit, for him to give him the skin of his magic donkey, fails she runs away wearing the donkey skin as a disguise. 

For all my fellow folklore wonks out there, I admit that Donkey Skin is not actually a Cinderella story. It’s actually is a closely related motif that includes such stories as Cap O’ Rushes and All-Kinds-of-Fur. However, as far as films are concerned, it works. 

If I had known about this film earlier I would have watched this with  Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. It takes a similar approach embracing the fairy tail surrealism and being deliberately theatrical. The songs are nice, but not good enough to be the reason to see the film.

I found myself being fascinated by what were probably simple practical affects but I was completely stumped how they did them. The best example was when the princess was wearing her dress with the color of “good weather” which shows moving clouds. I assume the clouds are projected onto the dress, but at the moment I’m not sure with 70s tech why the projection wouldn’t show on anything else. 

My next film, Charles Walters’s The Glass Slipper, as our very sarcastic narrator tells us, is the story of a cute orphan (Leslie Caron) who lives with her step-mother and step-sisters working as a scullery maid. Because her work makes her dirty she’s called Cinderella and… well… you get the idea. 

The Glass Slipper is a mostly straight take on the Cinderella story, though it has a lot of fun with it and tries to take place in a mostly real 1950s Europe. As a bit of a bit of a pedant, I have a hard time calling this a musical even though that’s the section Scarecrow put it. None of the musical numbers are songs, they’re all ballet fantasies. But they’re very pretty to watch so who cares?

 The best parts of it are Leslie Caron who is almost cat-like in her performance, and Estelle Winwood as the very eccentric Mrs. Toquet who fills the fairy godmother niche (and at the very end is revealed to actually be the fairy godmother)