The tremendous success of Merton of the Movies (1924) spawned a veritable franchise (comic strip, play, film and sequels), resulting in many similar country-bumpkin-on-a-quest-for-stardom properties being rushed into development. Originating as a comic strip published in the Los Angeles Times and syndicated throughout the US from 1925 until the early 1960s, Ella Cinders was one of the first films to focus on the plight of aspiring starlets who, as explored by Hilary Hallett in her 2013 book Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood, were arriving by the trainload in Los Angeles in the mid-1920s.
A “cinder-ella” story for the Jazz Age, the film bypasses the traditional motif of Prince Charming as savior (though the movie’s denouement does foreground marital fulfillment even at the cost of a burgeoning career) and offers Ella her escape from a life of domestic drudgery under the yoke of a tyrannical mother and stepsisters via the promise of “making it” in Hollywood courtesy of a contest for aspiring actresses. Ella’s later disillusionment comes not by the strike of the clock at midnight, but by the unemployment that greeted most ingénues once they arrived in Filmland.
Much of the film’s comedic appeal is provided by Ella’s accidental acting excellence, in which her reactions to real-world situations (as in the climactic fire sequence, revealed to be a mere special effect) are mistaken for true thespian craft. This neatly summarizes the prevailing, if somewhat contradictory, pre-Actors Studio mantra of many a manual about “Acting in the Pictures”: “Be natural!” By contrast, one of the routines prescribed by the book Ella consults involves “eye exercises” to express love, hate, fear, and so on, leading to an amusing split-screen effect for a subjective rendering of crossed eyes.
For early 1920s audiences, Colleen Moore was an embodiment of the flapper’s insouciance, a ludic, non-threatening modern young woman palatable to middle-class tastes. By the time Ella Cinders was released, however, her popularity (and that of the type she represented) had been eclipsed by the more overtly sexual variants popularized by Clara Bow and Joan Crawford. The press did note, however, that Moore’s own career closely mirrored the Cinderella story of her latest feature. Indeed, an “Ella Cinders” doll and a number of novels were created as tie-ins for the movie as part of an entire line that Moore promoted – being a major collector of dolls herself.
There are plenty of “inside Hollywood” gags and winks throughout the film, with Harry Langdon making a cameo appearance in a scene directed by a young Frank Capra, who was at that time making his debut feature with Langdon. Director Alfred E. Green, who also has a brief cameo, had already helmed previous moviemaking-themed comedies, including In Hollywood with Potash and Perlmutter (1924) and Inez from Hollywood (1924), and would continue this trend in the sound era with titles like The Jolson Story (1946) and The Eddie Cantor Story (1953).
The film was well received by critics, who nonetheless noted the stretches of credulity that some scenes represented. Mordaunt Hall, in the New York Times, thus found it “filled with those wild incidents which are seldom heard of in ordinary society.” It was a major box-office success for First National and Moore’s husband at the time, producer/presenter John McCormick.
Besides being a useful primer on the status of stardom in silent Hollywood – Ella is called upon to imitate such greats of the day as Jackie Coogan, Lillian Gish, and Charlie Chaplin – Ella Cinders also reflects the varied promotional strategies of exhibitors and the extent to which the movies had penetrated into the civic fabric of small-town American during the 1920s. The film also plays endlessly with the rags-to-riches-to-rags formula: the last act initially gives the impression that Ella might be back to a struggling existence, before we realize that her tattered clothes are just a costume she wears during a shoot for her latest film, From Poverty to Riches. Typecast but successful, Ella finally seems to have earned her Hollywood ending, but prefers to abscond with her beau rather than continue trying her luck in the Dream Factory.

Dimitrios Latsis