Spain, United States

• El fantástico mundo del doctor Coppelius
• The Mysterious House of Dr. C.

THIS IS "ENTERTAINMENT"!

New York - Since this is a ballet story film enacted and expanded on screen, the choreography has to be a salient value. It is first-class throughout, with Dame Alicia Markova as artistic consultant and the routineing by Jo-Anna Kneeland. The Kneeland system, part fractional, part innovative kinesiology, was used for some years under contract to the Rebekah Harkness Dance School in Manhattan. Conceived, produced, directed, choreographed, screenplayed and rescued from threatened legal oblivion by Jo-Anna and Ted Kneeland, "The Mysterious House of Dr C" is an original approach to the old 19th Century ballet, "Coppelia."
Theirs is a "happy" slant. The central figure of the reclusive scientist, whose house and laboratory are always locked and peopled with life-size dolls has been softened and sentimentalized. Coppelius here is mischievous, but not malicious, playful in his lab experiments rather than megalomaniacal.
The action is centred in an imaginary picture postcard village in faraway and long-ago Mitteleuropa. The dominating edifice is the doctor's. In the village square the natives are perpetually ready to dance when not curious about their neighbour. The "plot" is simplicity itself. Coppelius loses the key to his domicile, it is found by the leading girl dancer (Claudia Corday) who with a bevy of other dancers, penetrates the mysteries of the dolls.
The suspense factor, the fright reaction bits, the innocent merriment details have been well managed by producer-director Ted Kneeland. The American girl (Corday) dances entrancingly and is ably partnered by Caj Selling of the Royal Swedish Ballet. Also notable is Eileen EIliott as the village tavern wench who is in love with Coppelius - strictly a Kneeland sweetening of the classic plot. The ensemble dancers are young, fresh and appealing.
It follows that Coppelius himself is second only in crucial importance to the choreography. Walter Slezak has the necessary acting skills and personality charm to carry the bumbling scientist who learns in the end that he can like people not just dolls, will marry the lovelorn wench and presumably abandon his eccentric hang-ups. All of which comprises the pictures "moral message" and nowadays a moral message is emphatically a cinematic novelty.
The photography, the color in broad scope, the professional editing and timing, (all by the Kneelands) and the insistently "happy" tone establishes "The Mysterious House Of Dr. C" as the purest of pure G screen entertainment, fine for family, sentimental and ballet buff elements of the world film audiences.