The Star Prince (Little Players’ Film Company, Grapevine Video, 1918)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the two Lifetime movies last night (Sunday, January 12), I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a truly odd item: The Star Prince (1918), written and directed by Madeline Brandeis (a tragically short-lived filmmaker who died in 1937 at age 39; she has three film credits on imdb.com as producer but only one, this one, as writer and director). The Star Prince is an example of a weird sub-genre of fairy-tale movies enacted only by children; the studio that made it was even called “Little Players’ Film Company.” The most famous examples were made at Fox by directors Sidney and Chester Franklin in the ‘teens (both Franklin brothers went on to major directorial careers making movies with adult casts) and included spoofs of then-current films like Cinderella and Babes in the Woods. I remember reading an article about these in Films in Review decades ago and the author noted their frustration that some of the “Franklin Kid Pix” that still existed referenced serious fairy-tale or fantasy movies that were now lost. The Star Prince is a mashup of several fairy stories that in a way anticipates the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical Into the Woods (1986). It’s about a baby boy lost in the wilderness and found and raised by a woodsman, whose wife vainly protests that they already have four kids of their own and can’t afford to take care of another. Since the woodsman found the baby just after seeing a meteor fall to earth, he believes the baby is a “Star Prince” sent down from heaven. His real origin story is a good deal more prosaic: he’s the daughter of a beggar woman (Edith Rothschild) who was crossing the forest when she was set upon by robbers. She fled for her own life but, in her panic, left her child behind.

Seven years later the boy has grown up and calls himself the “Star Prince” (played by six-year-old girl Zoe Rae in an early example of transgender casting). He insists that he’s superior to the rest of the family and the common run of humanity, and he shows it by bossing around his foster siblings. He also insults his own mother when she comes around begging for food. A fairy comes along and punishes the Star Prince by putting a spell on him that makes his face ugly and gives him a huge wart on his nose. The Star Prince leaves his home in search of his destiny, and stumbles into the orbit of an evil dwarf (John Dorland) who is determined to marry the local princess (Dorphia Brown). Not surprisingly, the princess isn’t thrilled by this and has a fantasy image of a prince who will descend from heaven, rescue her from the fate of being stuck with the dwarf, and marry her, sort of like Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin. There’s also a witch (Marjorie Clare Bowden) who appears to be the dwarf’s partner, and the small army of imps they command to attack the castle and force the princess to marry the dwarf. As the Star Prince ventures through the forest, Madeline Brandeis pads her film with lots of footage of animals – notably deer and rabbits – as well as a squirrel who the now-humbled Star Prince rescues when he gets caught in a tree. (I’d really like to know just where this film was shot; the scenery is gorgeous.) My husband Charles, who got home from work about 20 minutes after the film started, was convinced that the squirrel was a stop-motion animation puppet and wondered if this was the first use of stop-motion in a film. (Not true: the very young Willis O’Brien was already doing his crude Claymation films of boxers well before 1918. O’Brien’s first credit on imdb.com was The Dinosaur and the Missing Link from 1915, featuring an ape-man he called the ancestor of his most famous creation, King Kong. By 1919 he had made his full-fledged special-effects debut with Herbert M. Dawley’s The Ghost of Slumber Mountain.) I suspect that if the squirrel were indeed done with stop-motion, Brandeis and her crew used limited animation (two, three or four frames per move of the model) rather than O’Brien’s full animation (one frame per move).

Eventually the Star Prince crashes the castle just as the princess has refused to go through the ceremony and announced that her destiny is to marry the first man who comes along once the moon kisses the stars – which indeed happens (it was probably supposed to be a lunar eclipse). The Star Prince refuses to go through with the marriage ceremony even though he and the princess want to get together because he first must make amends to his mother for having insulted her lo those many years ago. Fortunately, she’s right there on the scene, so he can do that and go on with the wedding. The Star Prince is a cute movie – with an all-child cast it could hardly be anything else – and though there are some glitches, notably the establishing shot of the castle which has two people walking on it who don’t have any relation to this film’s characters (so even this early filmmakers were using stock footage), it’s a well-made movie for 1918, with lots of close-ups and editing that is at least functional and tells the story effectively. Brandeis also got good performances from the kids in her cast (though the actor playing the king seemed way too interested in toying with his fake beard to be credible), especially from Zoe Rae in the lead. She was born in Chicago in 1910 and made her screen debut at three. Rae’s parents signed her to a contract with Universal, who used her so often she became known as the “Universal Baby.” She lost her Universal contract thanks to her parents; her dad wanted her to have a normal education and her mom was a typically headstrong “stage mother” who bullied the studio’s executives. Once she grew up, she tried for careers as a screenwriter, a singer and a dance teacher before marrying Ronald Barlow in 1934 and staying with him until his death in 1999. Before her own death in 2006 in retirement in Oregon, Rae was discovered by film buffs who were astonished to learn that the “Universal Baby” was still alive – though, according to imdb.com, her Universal films are all lost and The Star Prince is the only film of hers known to survive.