Two "Tiffany Color Symphonies": "The Enchanted Forest" (Tiffany, Colorart,1930) and "The Cossack's Bride" (Tiffany, Colorart, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 1) my husband Charles and I watched two oddball shorts on YouTube, both billed as “A Tiffany Color Symphony,” co-produced by Tiffany and a short-lived studio startup called Colorart. Both of those companies had the ill timing to begin operations in 1929 just as the stock market crashed and the Great Depression hit. Colorart went out of business in late 1929 and Tiffany followed three years later. Colorart, as its name suggests, intended to make all its films in color, using the two-strip Technicolor process which has been unreasonably dissed for years but which I quite like. It’s true it had one major weakness – it could not photograph blue, though it could approach it (in two-strip films with outdoor sequences, the sky frequently registered beige and the sea was teal) – but at its best (and most well preserved), it had a harmonious, painterly elegance that was often lost in the shrieking hues of the three-strip process that replaced it in the early 1930’s. Alas, though the two shorts Charles and I watched last night, The Enchanted Forest (not to be confused with the 1945 feature of that title or one from 1987) and The Cossack’s Bride, turned out (despite the preservation credits to a site called “The Vitaphone Soundtrack Project”) to be silent films with intertitles giving both narrative and dialogue. They were accompanied with Vitaphone records made at the time of production, and The Cossack’s Bride got a major lift when it featured two songs supposedly sung by one of the actors in the film. One I didn’t recognize but the other was the overly familiar “Otchi-Tchorniye” (but then again you could easily get the impression that there was a law in the U.S. requiring that every film that took place in Russia had to have either “Otchi-Tchorniye” or “The Volga Boatmen” in it).

The Enchanted Forest is about a young girl (Virginia Marshall, the only credited actor on imdb.com) who’s being bossed around by an unsympathetic nanny while her parents attend a round of parties (none of which we actually see) and she complains how much she misses her mother. Out of sheer desperation and boredom she escapes to the titular enchanted forest, actually a garden surrounding the mansion where her parents live, and we see a mysterious figure in the background. We’re not sure at first whether he’s a normal person or some sort of leprechaun or elf, but as director Martin Justice and cinematographers Allen M. Davey and Ray Rennahan (the latter supplied not by Tiffany or Colorart, but by Technicolor; one of Technicolor’s conditions for being able to use their process was sending out their own cameraman, either to work as “color consultant” with the studio’s own cinematographer or to shoot the entire film himself) get closer we see he’s considerably shorter than Virginia Marshall. He’s also outfitted with pointy ears and he escorts her to a clearing where a whole bunch of elves are ready to throw her a party of their own, including a marvelous scene in which we hear a xylophone on the soundtrack while some of the elves are hitting giant mushrooms in what Charles jokingly called a “fungiphone.” Meanwhile Virginia’s real mother notices she’s gone and is understandably freaked out about it, expressing her guilt feelings to Virginia’s dad and going out into the garden to look for her. Needless to say, by the time Virginia’s mom finds her all the elves have disappeared, but she rescues the poor girl who’s fallen asleep in the woods, takes her home, and seems quite a bit more solicitous about her than she’d been earlier, when she’d abruptly and callously brushed off Our Heroine as she was on her way to another party. The Vitaphone Soundtrack Project presented this as an example of 1930 special effects, but showing people in dramatically different size ratios was actually a pretty common trick at the time; one recalls the remarkable scene in the 1930 feature musical King of Jazz in which Paul Whiteman in normal scale brings out a satchel which he announces contains his entire band … in miniature size.

The Cossack’s Bride has a few interesting names in the production staff: the director is Aubrey Scotto, who spent most of the early 1930’s making “band shorts” (the 10-minute one-reelers that were essentially the music videos of the time) and Rudolph C. Flothow, credited as “supervising producer,” later went on to make serials at Columbia, including the 1943 Batman (the character’s first live-action appearance and an unusually well-done chapter play). The plot of The Cossack’s Bride is pretty simple: one Cossack leader (Christian J. Frank) has kidnapped the wife (Lucille Powers) of another (Gregory Gaye, who two years later would play a star director in Universal’s 1932 film of the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart Hollywood spoof Once in a Lifetime) and repeatedly tries to rape her. Needless to say, she’s not a happy camper about this. Her husband and his sidekick (presumably Joseph Marievsky), who with his long hair and full bears looks more credible as a Cossack than the other two, hit on an idea to get her back. They’ll disguise themselves as traveling musicians, crash the bad Cossack leader’s party, drink the bad Cossacks under the table and re-abduct the Cossack’s bride. Thanks to a weird bet the good Cossack leader makes with the bad Cossack leader that the good Cossacks will keep singing while the bad Cossacks will keep drinking and the bet is over who will have to stop first – the good Cossacks by running out of songs or the bad Cossacks by running out of consciousness – the ploy works and the good Cossack leader gets his bride back at the end. Neither of these Tiffany/Colorart co-productions are great, or even particularly good, movies, but they’ve been reasonably well restored and it’s nice to see examples of two-strip Technicolor at or close to its best preserved.