Ella Cinders (1926)

Ella Cinders takes most of the pain out of the Cinderella story—here the step-family is bullying but not really evil—and gives star Colleen Moore a chance to be both the romantic and comic lead at the same time.

You know the set-up. After her mother’s death, Ella’s father got married to a woman with two daughters. They are the Pills, Lotta and Prissy (Doris Baker and Emily Gerdes). Lotta fancies herself to be the beauty of the family and when a contest is announced to select the loveliest girl in town to win a screen test with Gem Films, Ma Cinders (Vera Lewis) encourages her to enter. Girls are to send in glamor photos, and the winner will be announced at the big dance next Saturday.

Ella wants to enter, too, but the only encouragement she gets is from the iceman, Waite Lifter (Lloyd Hughes), who thinks she’s pretty nifty. Photos cost $3, money she doesn’t have, so Ella devotes a few nights to minding the neighbor’s kids--at $1 per mind.

While sitting for the photographer, she is tormented by a fly. When the picture is developed, it is sent on to the judges, and when it is finally revealed at the dance we see Ella’s face contorted as she tries to dislodge the buzzing pest. Crushed, she rushes home only to learn on Monday that the judges loved her sense of humor and are giving her the prize.

In Hollywood, she discovers that Gem Films is currently shooting in Egypt and that the contest was a hoax put on by a group of sharpers. But just maybe she will be discovered by a different studio . . . What do you think?

There is also a subplot dealing with the love-stricken Waite Lifter that is resolved by a surprise (maybe, depending on how naïve you are), but the picture is essentially an opportunity for Colleen Moore to demonstrate her comedy chops.

Moore had risen to stardom in one of the earliest flapper movies, the now lost Flaming Youth, and most of her first lead roles were in dramas. (F. Scott Fitzgerald said of her: “I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth and Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.")

Don’t let that mislead you—Ella is a delight. Moore can deliver the romance and sentiment, and she isn’t afraid of looking silly. Back home, while she is trying to learn how to be an actress by reading advice from a book, she practices crossing her eyes. In a close up, her eyes, working against each other, zig zag in all directions. It’s a surprising moment of impossible humor in an otherwise realistic setting. The trick was accomplished by blocking the left side of the camera lens and filming her moving her eyes around, then re-winding the film, blocking the right side and shooting again. The result is said to have caused Moore to laugh out loud when she saw the finished product.

Never a raving beauty, Moore was lovely and had a beautifully expressive face that could look average when she wanted it to. In Hollywood, Ella tells a director she meets, “I’m the beauty contest winner,” to which he snaps back, “I’ll keep your secret.” We know better. We’ve seen her at her best.

The film was directed by Alfred E. Green and produced by Moore’s husband, John McCormick. The story and scenario were written by Frank Griffin and Mervyn LeRoy, based on the comic strip “Eller Cinders” by William M. Conselman and Charles Plumb. George Marion, Jr. provided the titles.

Also in the cast were Jed Prouty, Jack Duffy, Harry Allen, Chief Yowlachie, and, in a funny cameo, Harry Langdon.

Girl Shy (1924)

I remember seeing an interview with a fella who had interviewed Harold Lloyd well after his days as a film star, and he said that Lloyd was kind of boring and that the experience had been like talking with your stereotypical Rotarian. Dull, maybe, but I bet he wasn’t unlikeable, at least if he shared any traits with his Glasses Character. Glasses was usually shy and nerdy but, when the chips were down, capable and reliable.

In Girl Shy, Harold Meadows lives and apprentices with his Uncle Jerry (Richard Daniels). They are tailors in Little Bend (“as you rip so shall they sew”) and mending ladies’ dresses is as close to any girl as Harold, who suffers with a terrible stutter when he’s nervous, can come. He’s a figure of fun and none of the gals has taken the trouble to get to know him.

Ah, but these still waters run deep. Behind the community’s back, Harold is studying womankind and writing a book about his discoveries. “He was so afraid of girls,” the titles tell us, “that he made a secret study of them, and the more he studied them the more he feared them.” When he has a few days off, he intends to take the manuscript of “The Secret of Making Love” to a publisher in the big city.

The book instructs young men on the best methods for conquering different types of girls, the types being suggested by movie clichés. We see a couple of these chapters acted out. #15—My Vampire. Here Harold recommends indifference. A Theda Bara burlesque follows. When the vamp (an uncredited Nola Dolberg) threatens to kill herself with a dagger, Harold hands her a scimitar instead. #16—My Flapper. This time Harold uses the cave man approach while an uncredited Judy King gives us a wild Clara Bow.

On the train into the city, Harold meets the lovely and wealthy Mary Buckingham (Jobyna Ralston) when he rescues her dog from being thrown off. Of course he is immediately smitten by Mary, who is being pursued for marriage by the cad Ronald DeVore (Carlton Griffin) who is already married but prepared to forget it if Mary will only say “Yes!”

Other complications ensue when Harold’s book is read aloud in the publisher’s office and the women all go into hysterics. The publisher rejects the manuscript and the would-be author, too ashamed of himself to declare his love for Mary, pushes her away. She then accepts DeVore. On the day of the marriage, Harold learns that his book is going to be published after all (as deliberate humor with the new title “The Boob’s Diary") and of DeVore’s treachery. Or lechery. Or both. And the film ends with a terrific chase sequence as Harold rushes to the chapel to prevent the I-Dos, utilizing cars, trolleys, horses, horse pulled wagons, motorcycles, and anything else he can find that will get him from here to there in a hurry. The rescue at the altar was pretty obviously a major inspiration for a similar moment in The Graduate (1967).

The film is fast and funny, with an emphasis on romance over gags. It’s never dull and not for a moment will you think you’re watching a Rotarian.

The pictures was produced by Lloyd and directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor. Taylor, Tim Whelan and Ted Wilde concocted the story and the titles were written by Thomas J. Gray.

Hell's Hinges (1916)

William K. Everson has suggested that the newbie coming to William S. Hart for the first time would do well to skip over Hell’s Hinges because the star’s intensity could create discomfort and bad laughs. Among the heroes of the early western film, Hart’s characters were easily the most intense bad-asses of them all. When it came to eyes into which you had to stare, you’d pick a snake over Hart’s any day.

In Hell’s Hinges, Hart is Blaze Tracy, a bad man as unforgiving as his name. He’s one of the hombres in the town of Placer Center, nicknamed “Hell’s Hinges,” “a gun-fighting, man-killing devil’s den of iniquity that scorched even the sun-packed soil on which it stood.” Silk Miller (Alfred Hollingsworth) runs the saloon and is defined as “no man’s friend.”

A young pastor named Robert Henley (Jack Standing) is sent to town to remove him from the temptations of the big city. He comes with his mother and sister Faith (Clara Williams) and they are immediately taken to heart by the local “Petticoat Brigade.” They soon turn a barn into a church.

Blaze and Silk insist that their city has no use for eastern civilization and try to hurrah the Henleys out of town. But then something, let’s call it miraculous, happens. When Blaze sees Faith (“finds faith”?) it’s his road-to-Damascus moment. He isn’t smitten by her youth and beauty—she’s plain and devout, dressing modestly and rapidly approaching spinsterhood. But he senses a purity of spirit and begins to realize that there is more to life than the pleasures that lie on the surface. The good in this bad man rises.

But Silk won’t give up so easily. He uses Dolly (Louise Glaum) the dance hall girl to seduce Henley. Using sex and booze, Dolly dampens Henley’s inner light just as Blaze’s begins to, well, blaze.

When the treachery is discovered, Blaze hurls Dolly to the floor and attempts to rescue Henley who is by this time so besotted he refuses Blaze’s help. Silk leads the town no-goods to the church, where he convinces Henley to burn the place to the ground. In the gunfight that follows, Blaze lights the rest of the town on fire, and the film ends on a Sodom and Gomorrah note.

Joseph H. August was the cinematographer, as he was for other of Hart’s films, and his capturing of the fire is magnificent. Heat and wind combine to create genuine pillars of fire. You know as you watch that the picture has to have a pyric finale; it does, and August films it beautifully.

The movie’s credited director is Charles Swickard, but Clifford Smith and Hart were uncredited collaborators. It was written by C. Gardner Sullivan and produced by Thomas H. Ince. 

The cast is uniformly good. You can see in Glaum’s dance hall harlot the ego-driven selfishness that will emerge in full bloom in Sex four years later. As always, Hart is riveting, a dime novel villain who transforms into an Old Testament instrument of furious righteousness.

Supposedly Jean Hersholt and John Gilbert are a pair of uncredited rowdy cowboys in the crowd.