Snow White

Adapted by Winthrop Ames from his own 1912 Broadway adaptation of the tale published exactly a hundred years earlier by the Brothers Grimm, 'Snow White' was one of Adolph Zukor's Famous Players productions, the Famous Player on this occasion being Marguerite Clark in the role she had created on stage. Aged 33 when the film version was made but easily passing for a girl half her real age, Miss Clark is surrounded by a handsome if stagy production, lushly photographed by H. Lyman Broening, who when called upon also conjures up more spooky visuals for scenes such as down in the dwarfs' mine and - most vividly - the witch's lair; both of which can be recognised in the 1937 version produced by Walt Disney, who saw this as a 15 year-old. In this version, the witch and the wicked stepmother are separate characters; the former played for laughs by Alice Washburn, with Dorothy Cumming as the latter resembling Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in John Singer Sargent's famous 1889 portrait.