SEVEN DWARVES TO THE RESCUE (1951/1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

This black-and-white fairy-tale film was released in Italy in 1951, but managed to get a U.S. release in 1965-- which was the last period in which any American distributor was willing to take a chance on any film in black-and-white (except for movies with some "arty" intent).

I was hoping for something that was seriously daffy, like Mexico's TOM THUMB AND LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD. Unfortunately, what I got was almost an hour and a half of seven "little people" running around having comic misadventures until they finally got around to the "rescue" part of the story.

The basic idea isn't without appeal. Following the standard story of Snow White, the heroine (gorgeous Rosanna Podesta) is married to Prince Charming. However, Charming's kingdom is menaced by a foreign conqueror, the Prince of Darkness (George Marchal). Charming and his soldiers ride out to quell the threat, but the soldiers are defeated and Charming is captured. Courageous Snow, over the protests of her comical fat nanny, rides alone to the Prince's kingdom in order to arrange her husband's ransom. However, once she's in that kingdom, the Prince announces that he intends to force Snow to marry him. 

I'm not sure what keeps this powerful overlord from forcing the marriage on the spot, or why the only heroes who can oppose the evildoers' will are the Seven Dwarves. Worse, the little schmucks take their sweet time getting to the Land of Darkness, having some irrelevant interactions with a tribe of mermaids and with the fat nanny, who insists on assisting in the rescue. The only way the dwarves manage to succeed in their mission is that when they reach the Prince's castle, they blunder into his secret laboratory, where they find all of his machines. (What do the machines have to do with anything? Weapons that help the Prince win wars? Who knows?) The dwarves' destruction of the machines distracts the Prince from finalizing his marriage to Snow, and eventually leads to his humiliating defeat. (Despite his normal size, he gets wrestled to the ground by the seven.)

The sad thing is that the director and writers did succeed on one level, for even though the Prince is just a mortal who dresses in a devil-like outfit, his determination to keep Snow in his realm puts across a vibe akin to the myth of Hades and Persephone. Though Podesta's character is underwritten, Marchal projects good villainy, and I can imagine a dwarf-less version in which Snow White helps free her captive prince to overcome the tyrant.

A minor coincidence is that both actors played major roles in movies about the adventurer Odysseus under his Roman name Ulysses, for Podesta played Nausicaa in the 1954 ULYSSES, while Marchal played a version of said adventurer in ULYSSES AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES.