PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*
Before reviewing this film I chose not to reference any real
biographies of the famous Danish teller of original fairy-tales. Ckearly this musical biofilm, whatever points
of comparison it might have with the real life of Andersen, is first and
foremost a one-sided retelling of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse.
The name of the screenplay’s
author comes as a slight surprise: Moss Hart, best known for an assortment of
naturalistic stage-plays and 1947’s hard-hitting “relevance drama” GENTLEMAN’S
AGREEMENT. Hart and director Charles
Vidor succeed in capturing the delicate charm of Anderson’s tales, related by
“country mouse” Anderson (Danny Kaye), a small-town cobbler who seeks to make
his fortune in the big city of Copenhagen.
However, like the 1960s Rankin-Bass film THE DAYDREAMER—which imagined
Andersen as a fanciful young boy—this film seems ambivalent on the subject of
fantasy’s value.
In the opening scenes, it’s
established that Andersen’s original tales are a source of great charm to the
children of a small village, and at first it seems that the film is going to
take the position that fantasies are good because they’re an anodyne for those
times when “the world is too much with us.”
This seems the point of the film’s most famous Frank Loesser song,
“Inchworm,” in which Andersen urges his audience(s) to stop and appreciate the
beauty of life. Unfortunately for
Andersen, his fellow villagers don’t like him distracting their children from
the business of making a living. They
plan to exile him, and the only reason they don’t is because Andersen’s
adoptive son, a young teen named Peter, talks Andersen in picking up his
business and moving to Copenhagen.
Andersen never learns of the negative opinion his fellow “country mice”
have toward him, perhaps because the rest of the film places so much emphasis
on shattering his dreams in another department.
In the big city Andersen and Peter
immediately fall victim to small-minded authorities. Andersen is jailed for having shown
disrespect toward the statue of the king—a fitting touch, since the first story
Andersen tells in the movie is “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” However, Andersen’s cobbling skills come to
the attention of a Copenhagen ballet company.
Andersen meets and instantly falls in love with the prima ballerina Doro
(real-life ballet superstar JeanMarie).
He also witnesses her have a row with her husband, the ballet impresario
Niels (Farley Granger). Andersen begins
nurturing fantasies about freeing Doro from her tyrannical husband. Doro does nothing to encourage Andersen’s
fantasies, and neither she nor Niels—fundamentally a happy couple despite
their quarrels—are even aware of the cobbler’s “love from afar” until the end
of the picture. Andersen goes from being
the master fantasist who inspires children to being the victim of his own
self-delusion, as much as the courtiers who testified that they could see the
Emperor’s clothes.
Throughout this misadventure Peter
remains the sober-sided son constantly trying to pull his foolish father back
from disaster. His efforts only create a
rift between the boy and Andersen, though it’s eventually healed when Andersen
realizes his folly and returns to his old village. Here the film indulges in a major cheat for
the sake of a happy ending. It seems all the villagers have missed Andersen so
much that they have put aside their old quarrels with his quirkiness, and
Andersen can return to his “country mouse” life after being chastened by his
encounter with the city variety.
From start to finish, then, Hart
and Vidor choose to portray Andersen as a “child-man,” obsessed with his inner
world rather than making connections in the real world. His decision to adopt orphan Peter signals
his desire to acquire a ready-made family without ever having troubled to find
a wife. Perhaps there were elements of
the real Andersen’s life that encouraged the filmmakers to expouse this view of
him, but it seems more likely that they were simply playing to the image of
Danny Kaye as the nerd who can’t get the girl.
However, in most of Kaye’s other comedies, his characters do find
connubial happiness through various merry mix-ups. Despite the false cheer of the conclusion,
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN is a rare exception to this rule, making one question
as to whether the filmmakers don’t really have as demeaning a view of
fantasists as Andersen’s blinkered neighbors.
Though the film has ample
opportunities to adapt the famous fairy-tales into separate scenes in their own
right, it does not do so. In contrast to
the many fantasy-episodes of THE DAYDREAMER, here Andersen experiences only two
daydreams, and one of them is not a story, but Andersen’s mundane fantasy of
fighting George for the hand of Doro.
Later, when Andersen is prevented from seeing his story “The Little
Mermaid” performed as a ballet for Doro, he simply imagines the whole
ballet-sequence in his head.
In my phenomenological system, a
film qualifies for the status of “uncanny” if it presents dreams with such
fidelity that they have their own reality within the film’s diegesis. HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN does not do
this. The challenge-daydream doesn’t
maintain any level of fantastic verisimilitude, nor does the ballet. In terms of my system, a bunch of
stage-players enacting a play with fantastic content uses my trope “delirious
dreams and fallacious fantasies” purely in a naturalistic manner, since in such
scenarios the real-life framing-story nullifies the fantastic content.
This is not to say that my problem
is with the artificiality of a stage-bound fantasy. If someone took the “Little Mermaid” stage-show from ANDERSEN--
presented here as an adjunct to the main tale-- and presented the sequence by
itself as a straightforward adaptation of the Andersen tale, with no
framing-diegesis, then that adaptation would possess marvelous phenomenality,
no matter how creaky or artificial the stage-adaptation might appear.
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