SNOW WHITE (1916)
Article 4666 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-27-2014
Directed by J. Searle Dawley
Featuring Marguerite Clark, Dorothy Cumming, Creighton Hale
Country: USA
What it is: Fairy tale

A jealous queen seeks to have her stepdaughter killed, but the latter escapes and finds refuge in the home of seven dwarfs.

One of the pitfalls of a project like mine is you’ll find yourself encountering the same stories over and over again, and that’s especially true when the stories are as pervasive as the fairy tales. Therefore, I’m rather glad that this take on the story of Snow White varies the formula by giving the characters more back stories and establishing relationships between the characters, often motivating plot points that are taken for granted in the story. As a result, I found this version of the story charming and enjoyable in its own right, and it manages to have a number of plot differences from the most famous version of the story (the Disney version). In fact, if the trivia on IMDB is correct, this movie was crucial in shaping that later version; it was the first movie that Walt Disney saw, and there’s a few touches here and there that may have inspired similar moments in that later version. All in all, this is a worthy version of the story.