Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997)

            This film, as well as Photographing Fairies (1997), is a fictional dramatization based on several true events.  Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright (in the film, eight and twelve years old) took photographs of fairies dancing.  The girls actually took five photographs between 1916 and 1920 near a beck (British: a small stream) on property where they lived in Cottingley, a Yorkshire village near Bradford, England.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a champion of spiritualism during this period, published an article titled "The Evidence for Fairies" in The Strand Magazine in 1921 and a book titled The Coming of the Fairies in 1922, based on these photographs.  He was criticized by Harry Houdini, the champion for debunking spiritualists, during that same period.

            The film is true to facts as they were known at the time and it combines a professional screenplay by Tom McLoughlin (TV series' Friday the 13^th, They Came from Outer Space, She-Wolf of London) with good acting and editing and interesting cinematography. 

            The storyline is more journalism than it is plot points.  It sets the stage with WWI as a background, touts some of Houdini's feats, demonstrates pompous reaction to new ideas and uses concurrent film sequences for metaphors of each other.  It's a pleasant production, somewhat obtuse for young children, but appropriate for six to twelve year-olds. 

            During an interview in 1981, more than sixty years later, Frances and Elsie admitted, in a magazine interview for The Unexplained, that the photographs were fakes.

            Reviewed December 4, 2005                        Copyright 2005 Charles T. Markee

            MPAA: Rated PG for brief mild language.