D2D entry #44: Cinderella (1977, Michael Pataki)
(Featured in Grindhouse Universe.)
It probably says something about my character that this isn’t the only musical/porno adaptation of a well-known piece of juvenile literature that I own. I kinda hope that Bud Townsend’s Alice in Wonderland is better than the Cheryl-Smith-starring softcore romp we have here. Not that there’s anything wrong with this — it’s quick and amusing, mostly harmless and the songs aren’t too bad. It just suffers from a lack of inspiration. Though it has a couple funny ideas (the treadle-powered corncob vibrators were a nice touch), Cinderella mostly trades in wheezy slapstick and base-level wordplay when people aren’t simulating sex in front of a Vaseline-smeared camera lens. Smith makes for an appealing heroine, but the film goes flaccid whenever she’s offscreen (which, surprisingly, is quite often). Pataki and company seem perfectly content to be a double-bill slot-plugger; ask 100 random people on the street to make a film with this premise and this cast, and 98 of them will make an exact copy of this.
There is one unusual aspect of Cinderella — the “Fairy Godmother” is a black male thief played by Sy Richardson. He initially stumbles upon Cinderella while on the run from a group of angry victimized villagers and proceeds to use a stolen magic wand to grant everything she’ll need to go to the ball — a gorgeous dress, a sweet ride and, um, a snapping pussy. He then installs himself as her coachman (all the better to ransack the palace). Later, he’s saved from the executioner’s axe by Cinderella… though it’s worth noting that he likely wouldn’t have been saved had he not gone out of his way to help the white lady become a queen.
So what do we make of this? Is he a shufflin’ Sambo caricature? A nascent Magical Negro archetype? A proud trickster god? All of the above? A sly satire of all of the above? When Richardson, in the film’s funniest and most unexpected bit, tries unsuccessfully to use the wand to conjure up a bottle of Dom Perignon for himself, leading to the bitter observation that the wand “only works for honkies”… well, what message are we to receive? The push-pull social tension between what the character is and what it might be is far more interesting than any fairy-tale rumpy-pumpy.
