This time of year is synonymous with that great British tradition, the festive pantomime. Once again, however, the pandemic is making it difficult to get to theatres (oh, yes it is!). So, why not let Cinema Paradiso bring the pantomime to you, so you can have a fun night in with the whole family?
Although pantomimes were performed in Ancient Rome and evolved into the commedia dell'arte during the late Middle Ages, the form has been associated with the English stage since the 17th century. Originally, the action resembled courtly masques, with mime and music replacing dialogue. There would also be a slapstick interlude known as the 'harlequinade' and a transformation scene, in which the setting would appear to change as if by magic.
Famous actors like David Garrick and Colley Cibber would enter into the spirit of these lighthearted productions, which were usually based around the characters of Harlequin and Columbine. However, their romance so outraged Columbine's father, Pantaloon, that the lovers were invariably chased around the stage by a clown servant and a bungling policeman. Joseph Grimaldi is widely renowned as the king of the clowns. But his death in 1837 coincided with a shift away from the classical pantomime narratives towards the fairytales, nursery rhymes and folk tales that are still the custom today.
James Planché, Augustus Harris and Henry James Byron are credited with incorporating fable elements in the early 19th century. But the Victorians sought inspiration from such writers as Charles Perrault, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Joseph Jacobs, and Hans Christian Andersen in order to beguile younger patrons.
Of course, stage pantomimes rarely stick to the original texts, as the tendency to improvise or throw in bits of topical humour emerged after Britain's leading music-hall stars started appearing as the principal boy (who was usually a female star in men's attire), the principal girl (an upcoming ingénue), the dame (a veteran comedian in drag) and the sidekick (such as Buttons, who was often played by a younger comic). Innuendo was also added for the amusement of grown-ups accompanying younger family members by the likes of Dan Leno, Little Tich, Marie Lloyd and Vesta Tilley, who are among the many stars recalled in Music Hall Days (2003), while later vaudeville giants are remembered in Variety Acts and Turns of the Early 1930s and Variety Acts and Turns of the Second World War 1939-1945 (both 2012).
Pantomime also allowed speciality acts to bring some dancing, juggling or conjuring to proceedings, while the best shows also found room for a pantomime horse or cow that provided gainful employment to two actors in an ill-fitting costume. As children became the target audience in the early 20th century, scenes were designed to involve them directly in the action, whether it involved sing-alongs, invitations to the stage or byplay using such timeless pantomime shoutlines as 'Oh no it isn't!' and 'It's behind you!'
Despite the popularity of matinee screenings, when young patrons simply refused to sit quietly in their seats, such audience participation was largely avoided by film-makers when they came to bring pantomime stories to the silver screen. Instead, they returned to the source texts and made changes of their own to adapt the material to their star names. So, join Cinema Paradiso to see how the pantomimes that have delighted generations of theatre-goers have become firm film favourites.
You Shall Go to the Ball
The most filmed pantomime scenario is that of Cinderella. Drawing on Charles Perrault's reworking of a tale whose origins lie in Ancient Greece, the action centres on a young girl who is mistreated by her cruel stepmother before she wins the heart of a handsome prince. Over 130 versions have reached the screen since Georges Méliès inevitably pipped his fellow pioneers to the post with Cendrillon (1899).
He returned to the story of the waif and her ugly stepsisters in 1912, two years before Mary Pickford, who was known as 'America's Sweetheart', took the title role in James Kirkwood's Cinderella (1914). But this would prove to be the last live-action retelling until Molly Picon headlined Joseph Green and Konrad Tom's Yiddish updating, Mamele (1938), and Deanna Durbin played a waif who finds her beau in Henry Koster's lively musical comedy, First Love (1939). In between came such animations as Walt Disney's Laugh-O-Gram, Cinderella. and Lotte Reiniger's Aschenputtel (1922), which can be found on the BFI's splendid collection, Lotte Reiniger: The Fairy Tale Films (2008). In addition to a 1954 retelling of Cinderella, this two-disc set also includes such pantomime favourites as The Golden Goose (1944), Aladdin and His Magic Lamp, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Rose Red, Puss in Boots, Thumbelina, Hansel and Gretel (all 1954), Jack and the Beanstalk (1955), and The Frog Prince (1961).
Not every variation on the theme stuck to the Perrault or Grimm formulas, however. British director John Daumery's Naughty Cinderella (1933), for example, starred Winna Winifried as a gauche schoolgirl posing as a chic socialite in order to seduce her guardian, while Alfred Green's Ella Cinders (1926) was based on a comic strip by Bill Conselman and Charles Plumb and Herbert Brenon's A Kiss For Cinderella (1928) took its inspiration from a play by J.M. Barrie, who was better known for another pantomime classic, as we shall see.
A further twist in the tale was provided by Frederic Zelnik's Mister Cinders (1935), which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on Volume 2 of British Musicals of the 1930s (2014). This adaptation of a hit stage show stars Clifford Mollison as dogsbody on his uncle's estate and would make an amusing double bill with Frank Tashlin's Cinderfella (1960), a wonderfully wacky retake that sees Ed Wynn's fairy godfather intervene to help hapless Jerry Lewis stand up to stepbrothers Henry Silva and Robert Hutton and their starchy mother, Judith Anderson.
An alternative companion piece is Derek W. Hayes's offbeat animation, Prince Cinders (1993), in which a weedy prince (voiced by Dexter Fletcher) gets to go to the Royal Disco thanks to his fairy godmother (Jennifer Saunders). This could pair up with Ross Venakut's Charming (2018), which follows the misfortunes of a prince (Wilmer Valderrama) who can't stop proposing.
Among the other reboots of the Cinderella story available on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso are Andy Tennant's Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998), with Drew Barrymore; Tommy O'Haver's Ella Enchanted (2004), with Anne Hathaway; Gary Harvey's Cinderella Pact (2010), with Poppy Montgomery; Iain Softley's Trap For Cinderella (2013), with Tuppence Middleton; Tosca Musk's A Cinderella Christmas (2016), with Emma Rigby; and Eliot Hegarty's Cinderella: After Ever After (2019), with Sian Gibson.
In the same vein is the series spun off from Mark Rosman's A Cinderella Story (2004), with Hilary Duff. This is comprised of Damon Santostefano's Another Cinderella Story (2008), with Selena Gomez; the same director's A Cinderella Story: Once Upon a Song (2011), with Lucy Hale; Michelle Johnsont's A Cinderella Story: If the Shoe Fits (2015), with Sofia Carson; and A Cinderella Story: Christmas Wish (2019), with Laura Marano.Similarly taking their cues from the Cinderella story are Kevin Lima's Enchanted (2007), which boasts songs by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwarz, and Rob Marshall's Into the Woods (2014), the Stephen Sondheim stage classic that draws on the travails of such Grimm heroines as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel. And, while we're in a musical frame of mind, don't forget Charles S. Dubin's Cinderella (1965), the second small-screen adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's musical, with Lesley Ann Warren in the title role and Walter Pidgeon and Ginger Rogers as the King and Queen. And there's always Bryan Forbes's The Slipper and the Rose (1976), which pairs Gemma Craven and Richard Chamberlain in a fantasy scored by the Sherman brothers who had provided the songs for such Disney gems as Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins (1964).
Speaking of Disney, we should hark back to the studio's classic three-time Oscar-nominated animation, Cinderella (1950), which was directed by the dependable trio of Clyde Geronomi, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson and featured the vocal talents of Ilene Woods. She was succeeded by Jennifer Hale in both John Kafka's long-delayed sequel, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002), and Frank Nissen's Cinderella III: A Twist in Time (2007). When the studio asked Kenneth Branagh to direct a live-action version, however, Lily James, landed the lead in Cinderella (2015), with Cate Blanchett and Helena Bonham Carter respectively stealing scenes as Lady Tremaine and the Fairy Godmother.Starring Libuše Šafránková as Aschenbrödel, Václav Vorlicek's Three Wishes For Cinderella (1973) puts an Iron Curtain spin on the story, as this fine retelling was a Czech/East German co-production that was serialised by the BBC. Joining it in Cinema Paradiso's small-screen selection are Beeban Kidron's Cinderella, Herbert Wise's The 10th Kingdom (both 2000), Christian Duguay's Cinderella (2011), the multi-directored Once Upon a Time (2011-17), and Helen Sheppard's CBeebies Panto: Strictly Cinderella (2015).
We also have three more animated versions on offer, Toshiyuki Hiruma's Cinderella (1996), Pascal Hérold's Cinderella (2012) and Lynne Southerland's Cinderella (2018). If you're in the mood for something more cultivated, might we point you in the direction of the uncredited Prokofiev: Cinderella: The Bolshoi Ballet (1961), Tom Schilling's Cinderella: A Dance Fantasy and Cinderella Ballet: Berlin Comic Opera Ballet (both 1993), Viktor Okuntsov's Bolshoi Ballet: Cinderella (2008), and Brad Dalton's Cinderella: Opera San José (2018) ?
Once Upon a Dream
As Matteo Garrone revealed in Tale of Tales (2015), Giambattista Basile is the forgotten man of fairytale lore. Early versions of the Cinderella and Rapunzel narratives can be found in his posthumous 1634 tome, The Pentamerone. As can the story of Sleeping Beauty, which has come to tell of a princess (usually called Aurora or Briar Rose) who is cursed to slumber for 100 years by a wicked fairy, only to be awoken by a kiss from a handsome prince. In fact, the original fable contained a rape, so it's hardly surprising that it has recently sparked discussions about consent.
On screen, however, the tendency has been towards discretion since Georges Méliès made passing reference to Sleeping Beauty in The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903). Pioneers Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca (1903) and Albert Capellani (1908) produced their own short versions before Soviet siblings Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev (1930) were followed in the sound era by Hungarian George Pal (1933), Italian Luigi Chiarini (1942), Finn Edvin Laine (1949), West German Fritz Genschow (1955) and East German Katja Georgi (1967). The pick from this period was a 1935 stop-motion puppet version by the Franco-American combination of Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. But the most curious allusion to Sleeping Beauty came in the Disney wartime propaganda short, Education For Death (1943), in which a youth named Hans is indoctrinated into believing that Adolf Hitler saved a slumbering Germany from an evil pro-democratic witch.
Ironically, this was directed by Clyde Geronomi, who went on to supervise the studio's much-loved animated feature, Sleeping Beauty (1959), in which the lead was voiced by Mary Costa (who is the last surviving Disney Princess from Uncle Walt's lifetime) and modelled by Helene Stanley, who had also been the body double for Cinderella. Similarly, Eleanor Audley, who had voiced Lady Tremaine, returned to play Maleficent, although the role passed to Lois Nettleton in Jamie Mitchell and Rick Calabash's Mickey's House of Villains (2002). The 1959 score, by the way, borrows signatures from the Tchaikovsky ballet that is featured in Pierre Jourdan's profile of Rudolf Nureyev, I Am a Dancer (1972). It can also be heard in Nigel Shepherd's Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty: A Ballet on Ice (1987).
Scream queen Linnea Quigley essayed Sleeping Beauty in Henry Hurwitz's Adult Fairy Tales (1978), a sex comedy that also features Anne Gaybis as Snow White and Angela Aames as Little Bo Peep. James B. Harris had similarly strayed further from the text with the raunchy Some Call It Loving (1973). But the story has been reclaimed in recent times as a feminist fable, thanks to Catherine Breillat's The Sleeping Beauty (2010) and novelist Julia Leigh's remarkable directorial debut, Sleeping Beauty (2011), in which Emily Browning excels as a student who takes a job sleeping naked beside platonic clients.
Among the other variations available to rent from Cinema Paradiso are Toshiyuki Hiruma's anime, Sleeping Beauty (1995); Rene Perez's Sleeping Beauty, with Jenny Allford (both 2014); and Pearry Reginald Teo's The Curse of Sleeping Beauty (2016), with India Eisley. Another intriguing version sees Grace Van Dien being directed by her own father in Sleeping Beauty (2014), which is all the more notable as Casper Van Dien also plays Rumpelstiltskin in Jeremy M. Inman's Avengers Grimm (2015), which features Marah Fairclough as Sleeping Beauty, Milynn Sarley as Cinderella, Lauren Parkinson as Snow White, and Rileah Vanderbilt as Rapunzel.
The most notable revisionist take, however, is Robert Stromberg's Maleficent (2014), a live-action origin story scripted by Linda Woolverton that earned an Oscar nomination for its costumes in pitting Angelina Jolie's vengeful fairy against Elle Fanning's Princess Aurora. Having brought Jolie the biggest box-office hit of her career, she signed up for Joachim Rønning's sequel, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019), which returns to the Kingdom of the Moors five years later to see how the new queen and her godmother cope with the threat posed by the neighbouring realm of Ulstead, whose queen is played by Michelle Pfeiffer.
A third chapter is currently in development, but Disney also cast Kristin Chenoweth as Maleficent in Kenny Ortega's Descendants (2015), which has spawned the sequels, Descendants 2 (2017) and Descendants 3 (2019), to follow the further adventures in the kingdom of Auradon of the offspring of Disney's most iconic villains.
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
It's not known how Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm came up with the idea for Snow White in 1812. However, it's unlikely that events panned out the way they did in Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm (2005), which sees con artists Will (Matt Damon) and Jake (Heath Ledger) make the acquaintance of the scheming Mirror Queen (Monica Bellucci). Henry Levin's The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) offers little light, either, nor does the cult TV series, Grimm (2011-17), in which Portland homicide detective Nicholas Burkhardt (David Giuntoli) discovers his Grimm duty to maintain a balance between humankind and the mythological creatures called Wesen.
Several notable variations on Snow White have emerged since Sigmund Lubin's studio made the first in 1902. Drawing on the Grimm text, J. Searle Dawley established many of the familiar tropes in a 1916 feature, although the first talking mirror appeared in Dave and Max Fleischer's 1933 Betty Boop cartoon that offered an anarchic alternative to the customary fairytale views on beauty and domesticity. You can watch Betty - who also headlined 1934's Poor Cinderella, which can be found on Betty Boop's Ker-choo, Vol. 1 - in action in the gems collected on Betty Boop Cartoon Classics and Betty Boop: The Ultimate Collection. But you can't get to see Bob Clampett's infamous Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs (1943), as this is one of the Censored Eleven cartoons that Warner Bros have withdrawn from circulation because of their racial stereotypes.
Disney has encountered similar problems over the years, but David Hand's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) attracted most controversy during its development, when feature-length animations were considered such a risk that the project was known around Hollywood as 'Disney's Folly'. In fact, with Adriana Caselotti voicing the eponymous heroine, it briefly held the record for the highest-grossing talkie and landed its creator an honorary Oscar that came in the form of one full-size statuette and seven miniatures. Moreover, it gave the studio a monopoly on the juvenile market that it has retained ever since. Hence, the excitement building around the live-action Snow White that will be filmed in Britain in spring 2022, with Rachel Zegler in the title role and Gail Gadot as the Evil Queen.
Director Howard Hawks (who is the subject of one of Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert's Guides) was clearly a fan of the Snow White saga, as he twice tweaked it by having fugitives Barbara Stanwyck and Lucille Ball respectively seek sanctuary with reclusive professors Gary Cooper and Danny Kaye in Ball of Fire (1941) and A Song Is Born (1948). Surely it's time someone released in this country released Kaye's catalogue on disc, as it's clear from Charles Vidor's Hans Christian Andersen (1952) what a compelling and distinctive screen performer he is.
Such was the impact of Disney's masterpiece that few have subsequently attempted to go down the animated route. Naturally, Cinema Paradiso has unearthed some of the more interesting efforts, in the form of Kay Wright's A Snow White Christmas (1980), Toshiyuki Hiruma's Snow White (1995), Takefumi Anzai's anime series, Snow White With the Red Hair (2015-16), and Ben Zhao's Snow White: Happily Ever After (2016). Live-action film-makers have also had to devise novel approaches to the storyline. Take Walter Lang's Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961), which is set in the kingdom of Fortunia and sees Snow White (Olympic skating star Carol Heiss) seek shelter with Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Joe DeRita after her wicked stepmother (Patricia Medina) seeks to remove any obstacles to her bid to seize the throne. Even more offbeat was German Kurt Hoffmann's Snow White and the Seven Circus Performers (1962), in which the heroine was a heating engineer and the villain a retired stripper.
Cannon tried to redress the balance with Diana Rigg as the Wicked Queen in Michael Berz's musical Snow White (1987), but Joe Nussbaum shifted the action to the campus dorm of seven nerds in Sydney White, a 2007 teenpic that sees tomboy Amanda Bynes seek out some new friends after she is denied entry to the leading sorority house. Sticking with teens, David DeCoteau opted for a darker approach in Snow White: A Deadly Summer (2012), which sees stepmother Eve (Maureen McCormick) send Snow (Shaney Caswell) to a camp for juvenile delinquents that just happens to be plagued by a serial killer.
Restoring the Grimm to the tale, Michael Cohn's Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997) sees Lord Frederick Hoffman (Sam Neill) struggle to protect his daughter, Lilli (Monica Keena), from her stepmother, Claudia (Sigourney Weaver), a witch whose evil actions are guided by a magic mirror. A certain malevolence also pervades Caroline Thompson's Snow White (2001), which has Miranda Richardson's Queen Elspeth drive her stepdaughter (Kristin Kreuk) into the woods, where she is befriended by a dwarf named Sunday (Michael J. Anderson) and his six housemates.
Animator Steven E. Gordon's Happily N'Ever After 2 (2009) takes us to Fairytale Land in time to see Lady Vain (Cindy Robinson) trick Snow White (Helen Niedwick) into spreading gossip about town and losing the trust of her best friends, Goldilocks (Kate Higgins), Bo Peep and Little Red Riding Hood (both G.K. Bowes). This mischievous variation follows on from Paul J. Bolger and Yvette Kaplan's Happily N'Ever After (2007), in which Cinderella (Sarah Michelle Geller) has to grow up in order to prevent her power-mad stepmother, Frieda (Sigourney Weaver), from taking over the kingdom
A sinister pall descends again in Rupert Sanders's two-time Oscar-nominated Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). This gave the tale the fantasy blockbuster treatment, as Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) dispatches Eric the Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) to eradicate stepdaughter Snow White (Kristen Stewart) after she learns from her Magic Mirror of the threat she poses to her tyrannical rule. Directed by the supervisor of the first film's Oscar-nominated visual effects, Cedric Nicholas-Troyan's The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016) draws on the same Hans Christian Anderson story about the Snow Queen that inspired David Wu's The Winter Witch (2002) and Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee's Frozen (2013), as it chronicles before and after events to show how Ravenna fell out with her sister, Freya (Emily Blunt).
Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror (2012) earned an Oscar nomination for the costumes worn by Julia Roberts and Lily Collins, as Queen Clementianna seeks to eliminate stepdaughter Snow White so that she can rule the kingdom and marry Prince Alcott of Valencia (Armie Hammer). The same year saw the release of Rachel Lee Goldenberg's Snow White, in which our heroine (Eliza Bennett) is targeted by stepmother Queen Gwendolyn (Jane March) after she inherits the throne when her father is killed in battle.
The best of the 2012 threesome, however, was Pablo Berger's Blancanieves (2012), a masterly 10-time Goya-winning monochrome adaptation set in 1920s Andalucia that also includes references to the Cinderella and Red Riding Hood stories in showing how Carmen (Macarena Garcia) incurs the wrath of stepmother Encarna (Maribel Verdú) after she marries her bullfighter father.
Finally, Snow White is merely a supporting character who reminds the heroine of the need to trust her instincts in Jamie Mitchell, Mircea Mantta and Larry Leichliter's Sofia the First: The Enchanted Feast, while the focus shifts to her faithful protectors in Boris Aljinovic's Fairytale: The Story of the Seven Dwarves (both 2014), a musical panto mash-up that centres on the quest of Bobo and his friends to find Princess Rose's true love after she falls into a century-long sleep. And, speaking of hybrids, don't forget that the ever-entertaining Kathy Najimi features as the Wicked Queen in the aforementioned opening instalment of Kenny Ortega's Descendants, Descendants 2, Descendants 3 (trilogy).
What Big Eyes You Have
Few fairytales have been revised more frequently or radically than Little Red Riding Hood. Yet another story from the Perrault-Grimm stable, the basic scenario accompanies a young girl through perilous woodland, only for her to be confronted by the big bad wolf that has abducted her grandmother. Georges Méliès's 1901 version has been lost, but the BFI's Fairy Tales: Early Colour Stencil Films From Pathé (2012) means we can see British animator Anson Dyer's 1922 Little Red Riding Hood, which was produced for Cecil Hepworth's Kiddie-Graph series.
Many of the 17 pictures produced between 1930 and 1968 have departed from the core outline, while retaining a focus on the endangerment of children. In Little Red Riding Hood (1911), for example, director James Kirkwood revealed that Mary Pickford's travails had all been a dream. Animators Max and Dave Fleischers let Betty Boop shimmy her way through Dizzy Red Riding Hood (1931), while Tex Avery gave his heroine the voice of Katharine Hepburn in Little Red Walking Hood (1937), which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on Volume 5 of Looney Tunes Golden Collection (2007).
Avery also seems to have had Clara Bow in mind when he drew the nightclub singer in Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), a much-vaunted MGM cartoon that has influenced both the Toontown chase sequence in Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and the Coco Bongo scene in Chuck Russell's The Mask (1994).
Red resurfaced in Avery's Little Rural Riding Hood (1949), by which time fellow animator Friz Freleng had followed proceedings during The Trial of Mr Wolf (1941), which saw Red Riding Hood bring a charge of harassment against her stalker. There was also a subversive element on show, as Bugs Bunny allied with the Wolf in Little Red Riding Rabbit (1944) and Sylvester likewise joined forces against Red and Tweety Pie in Red Riding Hoodwinked (1955). By contrast, Walt Disney replaced the jokey tone of his 1922 Laugh-O-Gram short with a civics lesson in The Big Bad Wolf (1934), which formed part of a highly conservative Depression morality trilogy with The Three Little Pigs (1933) and Three Little Wolves (1936), all three of which can be found on Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies (2004)
Keen to avoid incurring the wrath of Joseph Stalin by making any metaphorical reference to a ravenous monster, pioneering Russian animators Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg played it thematically and stylistically safe in their 1937 monochrome short, although a trio of West German films did put a political spin on the story in the immediate postwar period. Mexican director Roberto Rodriguez took a more escapist route in allying his eponymous heroes with the Fairy of the Dawn to confound the Queen of Badness in Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb Against the Monsters (1962), which may well be the best title in our two-part survey.
The underlying story also impinged upon Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963) and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973). But it was Neil Jordan's adaptation of Angela Carter's landmark revision, The Company of Wolves (1984), that transformed the way film-makers in which tackled the topic by shifting the emphasis away from the folly and lustfulness of the Wolf to the heroine's psyche and sexuality. Hungarian Marta Mészáros (Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood,1989) and Pole Agnieszka Holland (Olivier, Olivier, 1991) gave this slant a post-Cold War subtext, while a mix of sex and violence informed Will Gould's The Wolves of Kromer (1998) and Giacomo Cimini's Red Riding Hood (2003).
In the 1980s, producers Menahem Golan and Yorum Globus sought to revive the storybook tradition with a series of Cannon musicals that included Adam Brooks's Red Riding Hood (1987), which sees Lady Jean (Isabella Rossellini) send daughter Linet (Amelia Shankley) on an errand to her grandmother's house. The same year also saw the release of Stephen Sondheim: Into the Woods (1987), a record of James Lapine's Broadway production with Bernadette Peters and Tony Award winner Joanna Gleason.
Elsewhere, Matthew Bright relocated the story to the modern American city, as Reese Witherspoon is preyed upon by Kiefer Sutherland in Freeway (1996), while Hayley Stark (Elliot Page) decides to take the law into her own hands when she abducts suspected paedophile Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) in the debuting David Slade's revenge chiller, Hard Candy (2005). Another variation took anime form in Hiroyuki Okiura's Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999), which is set in an alternative 1950s Japan that has been occupied by the victorious Nazis after the Second World War.
A police investigation also takes centre stage in Cory Edwards's Hoodwinked (2005), a fairytale parody that draws inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) to show how Detective Nicky Flippers deals with a case of house invasion. Similarly keeping the mood light, Randal Kleiser brought the story into the age of iPods and boy bands in Red Riding Hood (2006). But there's a darker edge to the 'Surprise Party' episode in Michael Dougherty's Trick 'r Treat (2007), in which Anna Paquin plays a twentysomething who dons a Red Riding Hood outfit to go trick or treating with a group of friends harbouring a dark secret.
The village of Daggerhorn provides the setting, as Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) finds a werewolf and witch hunter Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) blocking her path to grandmother (Julie Christie) in Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood (2011), which was co-produced by Leonardo Di Caprio. And the theme of teens in peril also drives the most recent feature reworking of the story, Danielle Coleman's Red (2014), which follows Rowan (Jodelle Ferland) to her grandmother's in the hope that life in the big city will improve both her attitude and her grades. This hasn't been released on disc in the UK, but Cinema Paradiso still has plenty more panto-themed pictures to tempt you with, as you will discover in Part Two.
