GROSS/41 1950 - Cinderella is film noir
It's 1950. Noir has peaked. Walt Disney has something to say.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
CINDERELLA, Directors WILFRED JACKSON, HAMILTON LUSKE, CLYDE GERONIMI, supervision BEN SHARPSTEEN, WALT DISNEY, production company WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS, released 1950, 76 MINUTES.
Can a film from any genre be noir? Yes it can. Disagree? Take it up in the comments, friend.
In a tiny kingdom, a young woman lays a plan. Cinderella, a minor princess, has lost control of her family’s fortune to her father’s widow - her stepmother. It’s a classic inheritance drama. Aristocratic family politics. It’s pretty brutal: the widow has advanced her own offspring and demoted her deceased husband’s only child to the status of staff in the royal household. In fact she seems to be the only staff. It’s a tough gig - 6 a.m. starts and long days. But, as we will learn, Cinderella is a tough girl.
She puts on a brave face. She’s certain she’ll recover her status. Every night she dreams of overturning the injustice of her stolen inheritance. Tiny birds wearing hats (also mice) wake her each morning and Cinderella tells them about her dreams of wealth and happiness. She’s sweet but she’s manifesting her revenge with cold intelligence. And, in the meantime, there’s the grind. She has to put in the hours to keep the lights on. She does so, uncomplainingly - smilingly, even - because she knows the clock is ticking. The stepmother is squandering the inheritance, the place is falling apart. Cinderella leans in.
Cinderella is an unquestionably beautiful movie, perhaps the most beautiful Disney animation. Backgrounds are simple, direct restatements of French decorative art, inspired by the watercolours of concept artist Mary Blair. And there’s a parallel between these witty, playfully-patterned watercolour washes and the intense, shadowed sets and expressionist lighting of the films noirs. Two ends of an imported European spectrum.
Cinderella is intelligent, resourceful and beautiful. Her competitors - the stepsisters - are slow, slab-faced, mean and, we will learn, they have big feet (Disney’s narrator goes with ‘awkward’). Even their mother, the Machiavellian - not to say wicked - stepmother, knows they’re not quite the ticket - and will need some help if they are to keep control of the estate and leverage their diminishing prosperity by marrying well. She plots.
But Cinderella’s plan is a subtle one. She knows she must escape from the collapsing estate. The walls are closing in. She’ll wait for an opportunity to win over another aristocrat - any aristocrat, really, but preferably a prince - and slide into his affections. She’ll marry him and be whisked away from her father’s chateau - leaving the idiot sisters and their scheming mother high and dry. See ya!
The opportunity comes more quickly than she could have hoped. Literally that night - the power of visualisation! The mark - the aristocrat she will marry - is the son of a higher-status royal - the king. We hardly meet him. He has three lines and about 90 seconds of screen-time, most of it silent. He’s a cipher, the outline of a landed nobody. We learn that this prince is your basic dissipated failson, wandering the kingdom with his entitled friends on their expensive horses, paying no attention to his obligation to secure an heir. The red-faced old king is desperate to get this wastrel married off.
The only characters with any meaningful agency are the women. The men are either dead, absent or comically ineffectual. Cinderella herself is a classic noir heroine - she’s an independent, working woman, she’s alone in the world, thrown back on her own resources and she’s a threat. She wins - and rides away into the sunset.
So the king arranges a huge speed-dating event, a grand dance to which every eligible young woman in the country is invited (it’s not a big country). Cinderella’s plan comes together at the ball. Prince and disinherited princess run into each other on a terrace, he falls for her. Ker-ching. We’re expected to believe this is a coincidence. Lol. For cinderella it’s in the bag. But there’s a wrinkle, a bug in the code. Instructions from her fixer - a fairy godmother - are to make sure she’s gone from the ball by the final bong of midnight, otherwise her borrowed outfit and her magical retinue will - poof - disappear. She just makes it, but leaves behind a glass slipper (size small) and fails to swap details with the prince, so now it’s a missing-person situation.
The king sends out a grand duke. He’s stupid but dilligent. He goes door-to-door - this is a shoe-leather operation - to all of the kingdom’s big houses, looking for a match with the glass shoe. Savvy Cinderella is in the home straight. The idiot sisters try to lock her up and then the stepmother thinks she’s put the lid on it by smashing the slipper. Oops. But, of course, Cinderella and her crew (a dog and some of those mice) are resourceful. She’s soon in front of the grand duke. And - plot twist - she still has the other slipper. Check-mate. Everyone is thrilled (except the stepfamily, obviously, now facing penury - and no one to clean the castle).
Inheritance is an important theme in classical and Shakespearean tragedy as well as in folk tales. It’s a reminder of the material underpinnings of economic systems - of how power and wealth circulate - as well as a narrative hook for stories about loyalty, love, greed and jealousy.
In the final scene, Cinderella waves from her departing carriage. We see only her. The husband, about whom we have learnt nothing, can barely be made out, his face behind a curtain, in the shadows at the back of the carriage. For Cinderella, we cannot fail to notice, this happy ending is essentially as described in the opening scene. Nothing was allowed to get in her way.
Cinderella’s naturalistic animation was achieved by shooting a live action version first, then tracing and enhancing the movement of the actors - an operation that predicts motion-capture and all the current techniques that derive an animation from the movement of a human.
I wish I’d seen this touring exhibition about the French inspiration for Disney’s art, when it came to London in 2022.
Janey Place, in an essay in E. Ann Kaplan’s book about women in film noir, says that “film noir has been considered a genre, but it has more in common with previous film movements (e.g., German Expressionism, Soviet Socialist Realism, Italian neo-realism) and, in fact, touches every genre…” “…the movement affected other genres: melodrama particularly, but there are westerns and even musicals that have distinctly noir elements…” This is my justification for treating Cinderalla as noir.
Substack friend Catherine Liu has a fascinating and wide-ranging reading group. She put me on to the Janey Place paper (PDF) and got me thinking about film noir as a movement.
You can watch Cinderella on Disney+. There’s a Blu-Ray.
And, because you’ve got all the way to the bottom, here’s a special offer. Support this project directly and you’ll get a whole year of this kind of thing for £2 per month instead of £4 or - an even better deal - £20 per year instead of £40.
Oh my God, I love this so much. Can we just do retellings of fairy tales in a noirish mode???
I can see how you can argue for it as Noir, because it so closely resembles a Douglas Sirk film, so it is rooted in both German Expressionism and Melodrama, which sit either side of Noir.