This is a good lesson for filmmakers: if you are going to shoot a movie with songs, do not let your songwriters also write the script, because they would add a song into the story every five or ten pages. The worst part can be if their muse is on vacation or retired. This was the case of this lame version of Cinderella by Bryan Forbes. It is terrible and overlong! I give it a few points for the beautiful Austrian locations and because Forbes, in the last big opportunity that industrial cinema offered him after becoming an "international director", knew the trade and skillfully put the stories on screen, although it is merely academic, without any flight of inspiration. Richard Chamberlain and Gemma Craven look somewhat old for the roles of prince and orphan, poor Edith Evans is used as a clownish little old lady, the art direction seems to be the work of Margaret "Big Eyes" Keane, the choreography by Marc Breaux is mostly routine (and sometimes even ugly, as the dance in the royal mausoleum) and the songs by brothers Robert and Richard Sherman... oh, boy! Far are the days of "Chim Chim Cher-ee", "A Spoonful of Sugar", "Feed the Birds" or "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (which were not wondrous either, but they accompanied very well the adventures of "Mary Poppins") and what we have instead are monotonous concoctions with lyrics about protocol, dead kings or royal weddings. Of the whole thing, I think the best are Annette Crosbie as the Fairy Godmother and Margaret Lockwood as the Stepmother, although you have to be a very bad actor to ruin these two stereotypes. So proceed at your own risk.
