s because the producers have not thought
out the philosophy behind it. A picture that is all action is a plague,
one that is all elephantine and pachydermatous pageant is a bore, and,
most emphatically, a film that is all mechanical legerdemain is a
nuisance. The possible charm in a so-called trick picture is in
eliminating the tricks, giving them dignity till they are no longer such,
but thoughts in motion and made visible. In Moving Day the shoes are the
most potent. They go through a drama that is natural to them. To march
without human feet inside is but to exaggerate themselves. It would not
be amusing to have them walk upside down, for instance. As long as the
worn soles touch the pavement, we unconsciously conjure up the character
of the absent owners, about whom the shoes are indeed gossiping. So let
the remainder of the furniture keep still while the shoes do their best.
Let us call to mind a classic fairy-tale involving shoes that are
magical: The Seven Leagued Boots, for example, or The Enchanted
Moccasins, or the footwear of Puss in Boots. How gorgeous and embroidered
any of these should be, and at a crisis what sly antics they should be
brought to play, without fidgeting all over the shop! Cinderella's
Slipper is not sufficiently the heroine in moving pictures of that story.
It should be the tiny leading lady of the piece, in the same sense the
mighty steam-engine is the hero of the story in chapter two. The peasants
when they used to tell the tale by the hearth fire said the shoe was made
of glass. This was in mediaeval Europe, at a time when glass was much more
of a rarity. The material was chosen to imply a sort of jewelled
strangeness from the start. When Cinderella loses it in her haste, it
should flee at once like a white mouse, to hide under the sofa. It should
be pictured there with special artifice, so that the sensuous little foot
of every girl-child in the audience will tingle to wear it. It should
move a bit when the prince comes frantically hunting his lady, and peep
out just in time for that royal personage to spy it. Even at the
coronation it should be the centre of the ritual, more gazed at than the
crown, and on as dazzling a cushion. The final taking on of the slipper
by the lady should be as stately a ceremony as the putting of the circlet
of gold on her aureole hair. So much for Cinderella. But there are novel
stories that should be evolved by preference, about new sorts of magic
shoes.