Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.
For the next seven weeks we will be looking at film
versions of Snow White that star a great actress as the wicked stepmother. This
week we look an American musical/fantasy film from 1987 that was released as
part of the Cannon Movie Tales series. It was released straight to video and
stars the incredible Diana Rigg. Sadly, it will become obvious *why* it was
straight to video.
The cast is quite good—Dame Diana Rigg as the
stepmother, Sarah Patterson (Rosaleen from The Company of Wolves) as the older
Snow White (with generic Sylvia Young School of Acting girl as the younger
version.) Your dwarfs include one of my favourite actors Billy Barty as well as
Mike Edmonds and Malcolm Dixon who appeared in Time Bandits. Mike Edmonds also
appeared in Men Without Hats iconic video The Safety Dance. But the film is let
down, not by the acting, but by the script. It was written, directed and the lyrics and
music written by one man—Michael Berz. To give him credit, there are some beautifully shot scenes with interesting camera angles (lots of shots reflected
in mirrors of a furious Diana Rigg singing about being jealous of Snow White and one of her filmed though a large keyhole)
and the props like the magic mirror are really, really interesting. But it
should never have been a musical. The songs are generic and unmemorable and
sort of tuneless. They have no range at all as if they were written to be sung
by people who aren’t technically singers—and perhaps they were.
Wikipedia offers us a summary which I will insert some
notes into.
The film opens with a handsome young
prince traveling through the forest in winter with his men. In a forest glen,
the prince finds Snow White lying in a glass coffin. The seven dwarfs arrive
and tell the Prince of Snow White's story through flashback.
Note: This is a really interesting way to start it. I had
high hopes for it when it began this way but then the prince warbled a sort of
tuneless love song and my hopes were dashed.
A courageous King and his fair Queen rule
their kingdom well. One winter's day while sewing with her maids, the Queen
accidentally pricks her finger with her needle, and a single drop of blood
falls on the snow outside her windowsill. The King declares they will have a
child with hair as black as ebony, cheeks as red as blood, and skin as white as
snow. The Good Queen eventually gives birth to a daughter, whom she names Snow
White, but dies shortly after her child is born. Note:
Sewing
and singing. The mother seems a bit on the sappy side but she and all her
handmaidens enjoy singing in a Stepford Wife cheerful kind of way with her.
When she dies and Diana Rigg comes on the scene there is no more group singing
of sappy songs about snow. When she dies after childbirth, she is in bed with full makeup and covered in crisp white sheets. I suppose it is possible they changed the bloody bedding before her husband was called in to see her, but really if she was dying who would take the time to do that??
Some years later, the king marries again.
However, the new queen is evil and vain and jealous
of Snow White .
Watch a clip here where Diana Rigg does her best
singing a song and chewing scenery about Snow White being more beautiful then
her.
When her magic mirror tells her that Snow White is now the fairest in the land, the Evil Queen orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the forest and kill her, and to bring back her liver as proof of her death. During a hunting trip, the huntsman succeeds in taking Snow White away from her father, but Snow White, realizing her stepmother's plan to destroy her, manages to escape into the forest where she finds a cottage belonging to seven kindly dwarfs - Iddy, Biddy, Kiddy, Diddy, Fiddy, Giddy and Liddy - who allow her to stay with them. Note: Yes, I rolled my eyes here too. There is a generic song sung by young Snow White where she can’t keep any of their names straight. Also, it should be noted that they all have completely different beds. Like a rock hard one, and a squishy soft one, a dusty one, a skinny balance beam sort of one and she has a weird singing montage about which bed is right like she is Goldilocks and not Snow White. She ends up sleeping –no surprise—in the only normal bed there is. Interestingly, the film says that the one whose bed it is, slept an hour with each other dwarf so that she could have the bed. This is texturally accurate as it appears in some of the very early literary versions but here is just an excuse for a comic montage of a dwarf falling out of several unsuitable beds. The King is heartbroken when he is told that Snow White had been eaten by wild animals, and later he is killed in battle.
Years later, Snow White grows into a beautiful young maiden. Note: An interesting thing I never considered is that she will grow to a normal height and eventually be too tall for their dwarf sized cottage with its low ceiling. So that was an interesting point I had never considered. Here you can hear them all taking turns to sing about their day. She sings of her domestic chores and her growing too tall (which reminded me of Alice in Wonderland) and they wear large hats shaped like giant mushrooms with a candle on each one (which is *definitely* a fire hazard) down in the mines.
When the Evil Queen asks the magic mirror "who is the fairest one of all", she learns that Snow White is still alive. The Evil Queen attempts to kill Snow White three times. First, she disguises herself as a gypsy woman and laces up Snow White in a tight bodice, only for the dwarfs to cut the lace with scissors. The second time, she disguises herself as an Asian comb seller and gives Snow White a poisoned comb, only for the dwarfs to remove the comb from her hair. Finally, the Evil Queen disguises herself as an old peddler woman and offers Snow White a poisoned apple. Snow White resists at first, but relents when the Evil Queen cuts the apple in half so they may share it. Snow White eats the poisoned half of the apple and collapses. The dwarfs are unable to revive her, and place her inside a glass coffin. Note: Okay, even the great Diana Rigg cannot save this. Her attempts at costumes are so weird and her accents even weirder. Her gypsy woman looks *exactly* like the stepmother but with different hair and clothes (her face is the same) but with some strange hybrid accent that is part Romany and part American South. Then it gets even weirder. She appears as a Geisha with that “my feet have been bound and my kimono is too tight and so I have to take baby steps” walk as well as a verging on racist (or should that be lacist) accent. Who would believe that a Geisha would be walking around the woods in the 1800s???? Then she finally disguises herself in a way where she doesn’t look like Diana Rigg and uses an “Oo-arr oo-arr” West Country accent for her peasant woman. The lead up to the poison apple was fantastic though. She goes behind her magic mirror to her secret dusty laboratory where she concocts a Frankenstein’s monster sort of apple (complete with the lightning and “It’s alive!” sort of contraption). Does her husband not know she has a secret evil lab in their bedroom? Did she say “Honey, I know I’ve just moved in but I would like to have some construction work done but don’t ask the contractor as I want it to be a surprise??” Who knows.
Here you can see Diana Rigg in unfortunate Yellow Face:
The film returns to the present, where the dwarfs allow the Prince to take Snow White to a proper resting place. When Snow White is being transported, the coffin accidentally falls off the wagon due to a tree falling down by a snowstorm, causing the piece of poisoned apple to dislodge from Snow White's throat, and she awakens. The Prince is enchanted that Snow White magically revived herself and asks her to marry him, and she accepts.
Invitations to the wedding are sent
throughout the land, and the Evil Queen receives one as well, leaving the magic
mirror into concluding that the Prince's bride is the fairest in the land.
Enraged, the Evil Queen smashes her mirror, which causes her to age rapidly.
She rushes to the church in time to see that the bride is Snow White, and then
disintegrates into ashes before heading back to the carriage. Snow White and
the Prince are married and live happily ever after. Note:
There
is a great scene watching her age in the carriage on the way to halt the
wedding. She arrives all hunched over and when the priest says “Speak now or
forever hold your peace” she opens her mouth and a tooth falls out. She turns
into a pile of dust as they look on horrified and then the priest says, “You
may now kiss the bride.”
Watch the ending here:
If you really want to see the whole film, it is available on Netflix.
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week as we
look at Sigourney Weaver as the evil stepmother.
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