Charles Vidor (1952)
This musical doesn’t pretend to be a biopic, making clear at the start that it’s a fictionalisation of Hans Christian Andersen’s life: a legend describes what’s to follow as ‘a fairy tale about this great spinner of fairy tales’. The art direction expresses this nicely: the village and sylvan backdrops in particular give Charles Vidor’s film an ideal, children’s picture-book look. Danny Kaye is miraculously natural and inventive as Andersen. His mobile face and voice are effortlessly humorous: he brings out the wit, charm and good nature of Frank Loesser’s songs, right down to each one of the derisive quacks in the early verses of ‘The Ugly Duckling’. Loesser’s ingenious song score also includes ‘The King’s New Clothes’, ‘Inchworm’, ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen’, ‘Thumbelina’, ‘Anywhere I Wander’, ‘No Two People’ and wonderful ‘Wonderful Copenhagen’.
The screenplay, though credited to Moss Hart, is nothing if not primitive. Hans works as a cobbler in a village near Odense, where he spends a good deal of time telling tales to the local children. He’s as popular with them as he’s unpopular with the killjoy schoolmaster (John Brown), who thinks Hans is filling his charges’ heads with nonsense and persuades the Burgomaster (John Qualen) to kick Hans out of the village. He and Peter (Joseph Walsh), the teenage orphan who lives and works with Hans, travel to Copenhagen, where Hans is immediately in hot water, thrown into jail for allegedly (unintentionally) disrespecting a statue of the Danish king. He’s released when the Royal Danish Ballet find themselves in urgent need of a cobbler: the prima ballerina Doro (Zizi Jeanmaire) insists her ballet shoes need fixing. Hans falls in love with the dazzling Doro, although she’s already married to Niels (Farley Granger), the company’s hot-tempered choreographer. Hans writes a love letter to Doro in the form of the story of ‘The Little Mermaid’, which is turned into a ballet, with Doro in the title role. Hans’s unrequited love for her causes a rift between him and Peter, who can’t bear to see his friend humiliated. The morning after the triumphant opening night of ‘The Little Mermaid’, Hans at last accepts that Doro can’t reciprocate his feelings. He heads sadly home for Odense and meets Peter en route. The two are reconciled; though Hans resolves to renounce making up stories, Peter correctly assures him that he won’t. Back in the village, Hans resumes his tale-telling to an enthusiastic crowd of children and adults, including the now smiling schoolmaster.
The shrill and sturdy village youngsters are decidedly creatures of Hollywood rather than of nineteenth-century Denmark. The casting of key individuals in Copenhagen – the little girl (Noreen Corcoran) to whom Hans sings ‘Thumbelina’, the little boy (Peter Votrian) to whom he sings ‘The Ugly Duckling’ – is more sensitive. But Danny Kaye’s intuitive, graceful interaction with all the children is a delight. Joey Walsh’s unprepossessing Peter is not Hollywood standard issue. (Walsh – as Joseph Walsh – went on to various minor work as an adult actor. More remarkably, he wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman’s California Split (1974).) His lack of slickness, in appearance and as a performer, gives a rather distressing weight to Peter’s neediness and confusion. The first ballet sequence raises hopes there might therefore be no need for a dream ballet sequence, hopes which are quickly dashed. The climactic ‘Little Mermaid’, although it features some agreeable sea wave effects and a pas de deux between Zizi Jeanmaire and her real-life husband Roland Petit, is mostly hard work. The ballet, which supplies the only dance in the film, adds up to an excessive chunk of its two-hour running time. Still, Jeanmaire and Farley Granger are entertaining in their love-hate relationship, which is beyond the romantically naïve Hans’s understanding. This effectively confirms the hero’s childlike quality. It’s a quality shared with the remarkable actor who plays him.
23 November 2017
