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William Wellman's Stingaree packs an astounding amount of plot (and music) into its 76 minutes, and is paced so briskly that it's a wonder to watch on that basis alone. But it's also one of the most delightfully romantic movies ever made, a mix of fairy tale, swashbuckler, adventure story, and romance all rolled into one neat package. The plot essentially crosses the story of Cinderella -- with Irene Dunne's Hilda Bouverie as the unloved heroine at the opening -- with the tale of a highwayman named Stingaree (Richard Dix), all within a quasi-musical context. Not that it is a musical, but music -- especially opera -- figures so large in the plot that there are these short, beautiful excerpts from Flotow's Martha (especially "The Last Rose of Summer") and other stage music works that help drive the story along and are perfectly and logically integrated into the plot and the structure of the film. It's all a strange kind of hybrid movie, recalling both the best 1920's swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and anticipating the operettas that $Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy would make for MGM a little later in the decade. Yet, somehow, it also all works, if the viewer is willing to suspend disbelief. The latter is easy enough to do with so appealing a cast and Wellman's pacing, which never allows one time to stop and ponder the implausibilities of the plot -- in that sense, the whole film resembles the tone of an opera more than that of a traditional swashbuckler. The strange thing is that it shouldn't all work that well; Dix is fine as the highwayman (this may be his best role), but Dunne, despite the fact that she's doing her own singing, is about 10 years too old for the role she's playing, and yet she still pulls it off. And the supporting cast -- especially Conway Tearle and Henry Stephenson -- are fine as well. Some viewers will probably find Stingaree too silly for words, and other balk at the mix of music and derring-do, but for those who can still watch the romantic sections of, say, The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland, or enjoy Douglas Fairbanks romping across the screen as pirates, bandits, or adventurers, this is a long-lost classic that should be better known. What's more, as with too many of Dunne's movies, it was truly lost for decades -- in the case of Stingaree, it was one of six RKO features from the 1930's that dropped totally out of distribution after its first run; owned by producer Merian C. Cooper rather than by the studio, this film left the RKO library and was unseen (except for a year in the late 1950's, on New York television) for over 70 years, until executives at Turner Classic Movies cleared the rights anew in 2007. It enjoy a twenty-first century premiere theatrical run over three days at New York's Film Forum in February of that year.