Overrated and overhyped

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The one person who makes the movie watchable is the delightful (on screen), and intensely tragic (in real life) Edith Fellows. After watching the movie, I looked for other movies of her, and then got the surprise. She didn't get many roles, probably none in a la creme movies, and that was - to top it all, due to her short stature! She was a delightful soprano, sweet looking, good figure, and despite that she couldn't get even musicals! This one is of course out and out her movie, and she does full justice to her part. Probably, after experience as child actress, even at this tender age, she was 17, the age of the on-screen role, she wasn't really a green-horn.It isn't a very unpredictable movie, the ugly duckling here has quite a few fairy godmothers,from Katy, to her best friend Susie, to cousin Marian, who were ready to do anything to protect her, even playing cupid against Linda (Edith)'s own cupid identity. There was only one cruel step-sister here, Eileen, who was step-sister cum step mother (legal guardian).Though it might not look as fair fight, one against many, but shrewd and manipulative Eileen was able to partially make it even. The musical numbers were excellently rendered by Edith and Wilbur. If my memory serves me right, this is the first soprano version of "ochi chernye" I have heard, and Edith didn't disappoint.

A musical comedy starring Wilbur Evans and Edith Fellows, this work is based upon a Gene Stratton-Porter novel that is the fundament for Adele Comandini's typically sentimental and breezy screenplay, with the diminutive Fellows successfully advancing beyond her child star phase, attracting suitors as so many fireflies in a variation of the ugly duckling motif. Light opera standout Evans, a bass-baritone, and Fellows, a pleasing soprano, perform several works from classical and traditional repertoires, including several duets, and are as well a pleasing romantic pair, with the narrative concerning several intertwined relationships of the heart, with appropriate hindrances, all settled with good taste. The lovely Fellows, only 17 when this was filmed, fetchingly portrays a girl of the same age fulfilling duties as Cupid while gradually hoeing her own beaux, and there is competent support from a cast that includes Alan Ladd, Jacqueline Wells, and Judith Linden, with a particularly fine performance by the seldom-seen stage trained Marian Kerby as an Irish housekeeper/cook.