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Learning That There’s So Much More to Colleen Moore!

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Talented, Fashionable, Creative, Funny and Smart!

 

Today, we celebrate the iconic and intriguing Colleen Moore, who passed away on January 25, 1988, at the age of 88. Her contributions to the silent film era and her impact on popular culture, especially her famous “bobbed” hairstyle and Roaring Twenties outfits, only begin to scratch the surface of this multi-faceted woman.

In the 1920s, it was widely reported that she was one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, and under that fashionable hairdo was a smart mind with an acumen for business. She amassed considerable wealth by wisely investing in real estate and other business ventures, and later became a partner in the investment firm Merrill Lynch (founded in 1914). She even penned the 1969 book, “How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market.”

With her film career established, and her finances solid and surviving the Great Depression, Moore turned her attention to her love of dolls. In 1928, she began working with artists and craftsmen to construct an eight-foot-tall dollhouse as her own fantasy fairytale castle. It took over seven years to build, cost about a half million dollars to complete, and features genuine diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle was gifted in 1949 to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where it still stands today.

In 2013, her film “Ella Cinders” (1926) was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Many of Moore’s early silent movies were “lost” due to nitrate film stock not being preserved or properly stored resulting in their deterioration. Fortunately, “Ella Cinders” was one of her films that was made available on 16mm safety film for non-theatrical use, and that has ensured the film’s continued existence. It is held by numerous film archives and film collectors, including the Library of Congress.

In today’s guest post, author Kathleen Rooney shares how Colleen Moore’s personality, along with some unique camera tricks, helped make “Ella Cinders” one of her funniest and most memorable films.

Colleen Moore’s “Ella Cinders” (1926)
By Kathleen Rooney

 

An oppressed, abused, and forsaken girl finds her meager circumstances suddenly changed to extraordinary fortune through ascension to the throne—literal or metaphorical—by way of marriage. That’s Cinderella for you, a folk tale with thousands of variations throughout the millennia and around the world.

After persevering through obscurity and neglect, which the audience is always given to understand are short-sighted and unjust, Cinderella attains recognition and defeats her nasty competitors for love and status, resulting in a crowd-pleasing happily-ever-after. Little wonder, then, that Hollywood has served this beloved fairy tale to the masses time and again, beginning in the silent era. Perhaps the dizziest, fizziest, and most madcap pre-synchronized sound version arrived in the form of “Ella Cinders” in 1926.

In the title role, Colleen Moore—also known in her day as the “Flaming Youth” girl and the “Perfect Flapper”—shines as one of the most charming people ever to stick her feet into the fairy tale character’s ineradicable glass slippers; or, in this case, her pretty satin flapper pumps.

Everybody can relate to a Cinderella story, for who has never felt under-appreciated, worthy of more? And everybody can tell from the title that this is one. The narrative is based, of course, on the ancient story, but filtered through the popular comic strip of the same name by William Conselman and Charles Plumb, which ran in the Los Angeles Times and was syndicated from 1925 into the early 1960s. Moore’s brilliant and volatile producer husband John McCormick (their marriage was the inspiration behind the plot of “A Star Is Born”) noticed the strip and negotiated the rights to the story.

He believed this jazzy new approach would be a perfect vehicle for his comedienne wife, not only because the role would showcase her signature vim, vitality, and comic timing, but also because it put a Hollywood spin on the familiar proceedings, being a story about not just moving upwards in life but breaking into Hollywood.

The film’s wacky 51 laugh-a-minute minutes focus on the titular Ella, stepdaughter to a family in the every-town USA of Roseville, played with impeccable pluck and girl-next-doorness by Moore. Ella’s dyspeptic stepmother, Ma Pill, and two odious stepsisters, Lotta and Prissie, treat her with all the contempt and snobbery we know to expect from such a family dynamic. Poor Ella in her tattered rags and bobbed hair labors her days away on their behalf, enduring their laziness and cruel behavior, while dreaming of something more.

As she gamely cleans the furnace and gives a slapstick rolling pin massage to her stepmother’s shiftless limbs, Ella is buoyed by little besides the affection of her unexpected suitor, the local ice man, one Waite Lifter, and the prospect of a beauty contest offered by the Gem Film Company. The winner will receive a cash prize, an all-expenses-paid trip to Hollywood, and a role in a picture.

Played by the amiably handsome Lloyd Hughes, Waite is the only one—besides us—who sees past Ella’s tatterdemalion appearance and into her true beauty and heart of gold. Hughes—with whom Moore also appeared in 1923’s “The Huntress,” 1925’s “Sally and The Wall Flower,” and 1926’s “Irene”—and she have a winsome chemistry. From the moment we see them together, we want them to stay that way forever, which is key to the happily-ever-after we are intended to root for.

Former vaudevillian Mervyn LeRoy co-wrote the script, and he stuffs it like a turkey with bit after bit. As Moore later reca