A Modern Cinderella

Anita Ragusa (Ruth Etting) is the daughter of a costume designer. At the last minute, she delivers a dress to a lavish ball. The snobby socialite dismisses the dress. Anita offers to model the dress. She's alone and starts singing. A drunken party guest passes by and brings her to the party.

This is mostly for Ruth Etting fans. The radio star is in her mid-30's and is no ingénue which this role really needs. At best, it's really an old timey middling musical short at best. It could have injected some drama if the rich owners actually did anything. It's not bad, but there's really nothing much here.

The chance to see Ruth Etting one of the great singers of the 20s and 30s who did not make too many films is not to be passed up. Even in a short subject like A Modern Cinderella and I have to say that Ms. Etting's acting was not as good as her singing.

Ruth plays the daughter of an Italian tailor played by Adrian Rosley who makes Chico Marx's Italian look like a Renaissance Prince. He asks his daughter to rush deliver a gown over to a swank party.

When she models the gown, she gets invited to the party by the chauffeur a most tipsy Brian Donlevy. Where she delivers a couple of songs in good Ruth Etting style.

Etting never did really make it in Hollywood. Her life turned out to be a great subject for a great film where Doris Day played her. Best you see her in the Eddie Cantor classic Roman Scandals where she has a big Sam Goldwyn/Busby Berkeley production number No More Love.

I've seen a number of Ruth Etting shorts and have never really understood what was so great about her. She was a below-par actress and a passable singer. She certainly is not the singer that Doris Day portrays in "Love Me or Leave Me". In this short, she portrays the daughter of an Italian tailor who must deliver a gown to a socialite for a party. At the party, she is asked to sing. This is where we get her two musical numbers. The comedy in this short is mild at best and the supporting players do not add much. Ruth Etting does not give anything to her role; she is not funny and it seems that she is reading her dialog. I suppose her poor acting kept her in shorts and in guest spots in features. The Brooklyn Vitaphone short subject unit was never a great studio for comedy. They tried, but they rarely succeeded. They did not use Bob Hope properly and gave Shemp Howard some very bad material. This is just another in the series of comedy misfires from Vitaphone.

I know Buddy Ebsen when I see him dancing. Nobody can dance like that except Buddy. I don't know who his partner was, but, she was great herself. This duo dance routine in this "A Modern Cinderella" IS the highlight of this whole Vitaphone Short.

I tried to find a reference to Buddy Ebsen in this short but he was not mentioned anywhere...... But... Now you know!

It's easy to agree with the other reviewers that Etting wasn't the greatest singer and that this short is sub-par in many ways. Shorts, however, were shown between the main features and Etting was primarily a radio star--perhaps the first woman to fully become a radio-based celebrity. It's hard to know what she really sounded like--the technology of the day doesn't compare to now and if you listen to the spoken dialog it's just about as tinny as the vocals.

But I was very surprised to see the bit of creative film-making in the middle of this short. I'm referring to the scene where Etting is filmed sitting singing into a mirror. We see her sing through her reflection. Then, the mirror image changes and the frame around the mirror becomes a screen into which Etting and the audience can see, as if by remote surveillance video, the other characters going through their motions elsewhere. This was a common understanding at the time of what television would look like when made available. It also pretty well encapsulates Jacques Lacan's notion of the mirror stage--that place where the real and the fantasy bump against each other when desire comes out to play.

Not a great short but always interesting to find hidden gems of cinema making no matter where Hollywood buried them at the time.