Movie Review: Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen (1952)
directed by Charles Vidor, starring Danny Kaye

(Note: This is my entry in the Words, Words, Words! Blogathon, Hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association.)

Hans Christian Andersen (Danny Kaye) is the most contented man in all of his tiny village. Even though he's only a humble cobbler, his knack for spinning fairy tales out of the air dazzles the children and keeps Hans himself happily living in fantasy land. However, his tales don't sit well with the local schoolteacher, who sees his charges abandoning their books to listen to Hans. He demands that Hans be kicked out. Peter (Joey Walsh), Hans' young ward, protects his friend's innocence by convincing him to leave town for Copenhagen. Hans, overcome with the city's glamor, agrees and sets off for a grand adventure. Along the way, he wins the hearts of many people with his charming stories and songs. But one day, the naive storyteller meets a beautiful ballerina (Zizi Jeanmaire) and her angry, shouting director-husband (Farley Granger). Hans is immediately smitten with the dancer's charms. Even more so when he realizes she's the victim of an abusive marriage. His much more practical friend Peter thinks Hans is setting himself up for tragedy. But Hans is too busy pouring out his heart into a new tragic fairy tale, "The Little Mermaid," to listen. Little does he realize that he's living out his own story in a way he never imagined...

Hans Christian Andersen is one of those movies that is far more fascinating to me for what it suggests about the people that make it and watch it than for anything in the movie itself. It's a movie about one of the most famous storytellers that ever lived, the man whose best fairy tales ("The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Snow Queen") feel as timeless as the oldest stories on earth. And yet, this movie, the most famous filmed version of Andersen's life tries to honor him while simultaneously working its hardest to obliterate Andersen himself. 

It's a biopic movie, told as a fairy tale. The film even opens with a title card that says flat out they're going for pure fantasy here, no facts: "Once upon a time there lived in Denmark a great storyteller named Hans Christian Andersen. This is not the story of his life, but a fairy tale about the great spinner of fairy tales." I have to admit, it's kind of refreshing to have one of those "great artist" movies that just tells you upfront that it's not even going to pretend to a smidgen of accuracy. I've sat through so many biographical movies (the Bronte sisters melodrama Devotion being the latest and silliest) that diligently smuggle in a few facts here and there like they're crushing up some vitamin pills in the dessert. Instead
of trying for halfhearted realism, the makers of Hans Christian Andersen choose enthusiasm and magic, all the way.

Instead of making Hans Christian Andersen into the difficult, depressed, ambitious man he was, here he's a happy, singing cobbler who spins dreams for children. Instead of being a busy, proudly perfectionist writer, in this movie he stumbles into authorship in the way a man in a fairy tale might stumble into a magic castle. Instead of being a man who longed for adulation and worked hard for patronage, the Andersen that Danny Kaye plays is a simple soul whose happiest moments are when he can bring a smile to a child's face.

It's an approach to biopics that is, despite the awkwardness, kind of charming in its sincerity. This movie, helped along by a string of hummable Frank Loesser songs and a Danny Kaye performance that miraculously holds things together, is a sweet tribute to the way fairy tales can make us feel. How they can cheer us in times of trouble, help us find humor in strange places, and, as the character of Hans finds out, how they can sometimes mislead us into thinking people much less than they are.

However, the thing that makes Hans Christian Andersen a truly strange film for me, for all it's many enjoyable parts is that the very people who want to honor Andersen's life by telling it as a fairy tale end up with a film that seems as if it were made by people who never actually sat down and really read his fairy tales at all.

And seeing as how this film was a Samuel Goldwyn pet project, that's very likely the case.

My grandmother gave me a book of the complete fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen when I was a child. And one thing I learned very quickly was that Andersen fairy tales were dark. Not the dark of unabridged Grimm fairy tales; Andersen wasn't crude enough to scare
you with blood and gore alone. Oh no, you read Andersen, you get treated to gems like "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf," in which a girl who makes the fatal mistake of using a bread loaf to keep her feet dry is rewarded with a stint in a peat bog as a witch's statue. She is forced to stay in this immobile state while hearing people on earth tell her story and weep over her sin for generations. Later on, our bread-treading girl gets to show her penitence by flying around as a bird, giving bread crumbs to other starving birds until the crumbs add up to the bread she misused. Other Andersen tales include "The Red Shoes" (a girl nearly dances herself to death until her feet are cut off), "The Story of a Mother" (a woman who fights Death tooth and nail for the life of her child, to the point of pressing thorn bushes against her bare chest and giving up her own eyes, only to be told her child is better off safe in Heaven) and "The Snowman" (a snowman falls hopelessly in love with a stove, melts, and is forgotten).

However, what struck me, even as a kid, way more than the brutal punishments and death that exist in Andersen stories, is the tone of isolation and suffering that permeates even his more whimsical tales. He could find anguish in two toys sitting on a mantel or in a Christmas tree. His characters are almost crushed under the weight of unrequited love, a personal pain that hardly ever seems to happen in our Perrault and Grimm fairy tales. Even when people win and find happy endings, they're bittersweet after the taste of so much sorrow.

And yet, Andersen's tales often succeed in speaking so well to people (children and adults) because they never take for granted those hurt feelings that sometimes really do last our whole lives. There's a reason the phrase "ugly duckling" has become a permanent part of the lexicon. And the physical tortures he inflicted on his characters could sometimes be the perfect metaphors for a character's feeling. In the original "The Little Mermaid," the mermaid not only trades the voice that would allow her to speak her feelings to her beloved human. She also endures the pain of invisible knives cutting her feet every time she walks; the price she pays for becoming a new person is a life without true rest or relief.

This is the problem with Hans Christian Andersen the Movie. At no point is it possible to connect Danny Kaye's happy cobbler with a man who could understand deep feelings of loss or a lack of belonging. The movie does hint in this direction by giving us a plot about Hans falling in love with a ballerina and, thanks to his lack of real world understanding, imagining her as a damsel in distress who loves him, too. It gives a touch of poignancy that the movie badly needs. However, the movie works so hard to emphasize the whole angle of Hans Christian Andersen, Friend to All Children, that it can't connect the man to his own actual work.

So, after all that, what makes Hans Christian Andersen a movie worth watching? Danny Kaye. After seeing so many great comedians crash and burn on the Shoals of Sentimentality (it's pretty tricky to switch to sincerity if all you're used to is snark), I was pleasantly surprised with how well Danny Kaye managed to convince me that he really is a goodhearted, humble soul who makes children smile. His idea of Hans is a man who's simple but never simpleminded. He's not dumb, he just finds too much wonder in the world to pay attention to those boring everyday matters. He gets along with kids because they're on the same wavelength. Kaye has the charisma and the acting talent to make these scenes work. Whether he's inventing "Thumbelina" for a little girl outside his jail cell or "The Ugly Duckling" for a boy with a shaved head, he's always good company. Oh and when he sings the song, "I'm Hans Christian Andersen," it will never leave your head. 

Kaye's counterpart is Joey Walsh, a child actor who plays Hans' young ward Peter (at least I guess he's a ward, the movie never really explains). Just as Hans is the child in the grown man's body, Peter is the adult in a child's boy. It's his job to explain to Hans why he has to focus on the business of cobbling shoes as well as making fairy tales. He is the one who stays by Hans' side and tries to protect him from the humiliations that others might heap on him. And Peter is the one who understands where Hans' ill-fated attraction to a married ballerina will lead him. Joey Walsh is fine in the role and the moment where Hans tries to send his friend away in a fit of temper is surprisingly sad.

Hans Christian Andersen is so much a Danny Kaye showcase that, other than Peter, the supporting characters don't fully register. Which is a shame because the whole unrequited love subplot, with Farley Granger and Zizi Jeanmaire as a dancing couple locked in a complex love-hate relationship, really begs for more explanation.

Farley Granger famously summed up Hans Christian Andersen as "Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets boy." He was pissed off at Goldwyn for foisting him into the underwritten part of the dance director who simultaneously bullies and worships his wife. Granger was nearing the end of his glory days as a Goldwyn contract player and playing second banana in a Danny Kaye vehicle could hardly have sweetened the deal. Kaye also, reportedly, saved most of his charm for his onscreen moments, carping at his director, his fellow actors, and complaining whenever he felt cheated of something. He objected to Granger getting to sing in a duet with Jeanmaire, taking the part for himself. 

Granger answered second-class treatment and a second-class part with a second-class performance. He looks great in costume but can't muster up much than bored petulance. But then, what can you do in in a part that asks you to play one half of a sadomasochistic love affair in a brightly saturated, singing kid's movie? Maybe George Sanders could have pulled that one off but not the clearly bored-out-of-his mind Farley Granger.

Moira Shearer was Goldwyn's original choice for Doro, the object of Hans' infatuation. Unfortunately, Shearer became pregnant and the role went to Zizi Jeanmaire, the famous ballerina who danced into international stardom with her 1949 interpretation of Carmen. I say, unfortunately, not because I have any real problem with Jeanmaire, but because I have a real soft spot for Shearer whose redheaded, wide-eyed beauty seems much more in tune with the damsel in distress that Hans dreams up. She was also a better actress than Michael Powell liked to admit; her tragic fates in The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom wouldn't carry nearly the bite if Shearer's characters didn't seem so joyously alive.

Jeanmaire on the other hand, plays Doro as a preening, self-absorbed cliche of a French ballerina. She's saucy and smirking, the kind of woman who seems more likely to inspire, well, Carmen, than The Little Mermaid. She's got charm but I never once believed her chemistry with either Kaye or Granger. Still, Jeanmaire does get a great moment at the end, when Doro finally, for the first time, realizes that Hans is a human being with feelings that she has completely taken for granted. The slow-dawning understanding in her eyes allows us to see, for the first time, Doro as a woman who could dance The Little Mermaid and mean it.

Also, Zizi Jeanmaire does get a fine showcase for her talents with The Little Mermaid ballet, choreographed by her husband Roland Petit. Some reviewers don't care much for the ballet interlude in the film, but I think it's a treat, adding a welcome touch of darkness and starkly beautiful pantomime to a very bright, tuneful movie. Also, if it wasn't for me looking up facts about Petit and Jeanmaire, I might never have found out about this gorgeous real-life couple of almost sixty years, who, in addition to their balletic brilliance, had the gift of looking perpetually adorable and in love in nearly every photo taken of them.

At the time of its release, Hans Christian Andersen was a smash success for Samuel Goldwyn, then in the twilight of his movie-making career. And yet, this movie exists uneasily in the land of semi-classics. It's too fondly remembered by too many people who saw and loved it as a kid to be totally forgotten. And yet it doesn't fully click for a lot of people, myself included. Really, if anyone nowadays wants to tackle a Hans Christian Andersen movie musical that actually puts some of the real Andersen in it, I would be behind them all the way. I would pay money to see someone write a song about that time when Hans Christian Andersen stayed with Charles Dickens and made himself The Most Annoying Houseguest of All Time (so annoying in fact, that he reportedly inspired Uriah Heep). Can you imagine the Dickens-Andersen duet?

In the end, even if the 1952 Hans Christian Andersen is not fully to my taste, I can still concede that there's room enough in this world for all kinds of fairy tales. The kind that end in Hollywood box office and the kind that end in peat bogs. The kind that tell what a man's work means to someone and the kind that tell us that storytelling, no matter how silly or serious, really matters.

Favorite Quote:

"The other day I asked my Gerta what time it was and she said that the minute hand and the hour hand weren't speaking to each other. They were both in love with the second hand. And they wouldn't make up until they met at twelve o'clock. And no one could tell the time until then."

Favorite Scene:

Danny Kaye singing "I'm Hans Christian Andersen." It's just so irresistibly catchy.

Final Six Words:

Sugar-spun fantasy of writer's life

Movie Review: Scandal Sheet

Scandal Sheet (1952)
directed by Phil Karlson, starring Broderick Crawford, John Derek

Note: This is my entry in the Journalism in Classic Film Blogathon, hosted by Comet Over Hollywood and Lindsay's Movie Musings

Once upon a time, the Daily Express was a respectable newspaper. In the hands of the unscrupulous editor Mark Chapman (Broderick Crawford), it's devolved into little more than a tabloid, with headlines like "Police Seek Gorilla Man-Slayer." Honor and prestige don't matter much to Chapman though, so long as circulation keeps rising. His star reporter Steve McCleary (John Derek) is a chip off the old block, resorting to tricks and lies to get the best headlines. Columnist Julie Allison (Donna Reed) is appalled at Chapman and McCleary's tactics but her objections are always steamrollered.

But Chapman's latest gag will wind up tying a noose around his neck. At a Lonelyhearts Ball sponsored by the Daily Express, a woman (Rosemary DeCamp) approaches Chapman with news that could break his career. She's the wife he abandoned twenty years ago and she's going to let the whole world know what a crook he is. They struggle and Chapman accidentally kills her. He covers up the crime, but he doesn't reckon on just how well he trained his protege McCleary. The young man is convinced that the Lonelyhearts Murder will be the story of his career and he's determined to sniff out every possible lead. Now Chapman is caught in a game of keeping McCleary off his trail without drawing suspicion. He's got to keep this story buried...no matter who he has to bury along with it.

One of my high school English teachers used to quote from a text that said detectives are the most natural heroes of a story because they want the same thing the reader wants: to know what's going on. The same thing could be said for fictional reporters with one crucial difference. It's the reporter's job to tell the truth, to broadcast it and sell it. A fictional detective can uncover the murderer and go home to tea and biscuits, satisfied that his work is done. The reporter always has to make a choice in how the information is used. It's a distinction that makes the reporter equally adept in the role of villain or hero. Things will never be clear-cut for them. There will always be consequences. There will always be one eye on the profit margin. No wonder reporters are always such cynics in the movies.

Scandal Sheet takes a basic but irresistible premise: what if the reporter was the one who committed the crime? And what if he had to make it look like he wanted to uncover the truth, even while doing everything possible to conceal it? The movie raises the stakes even further by pitting the villainous protagonist against his own protege, a man who'll do anything to get the story because that's what his boss taught him. The irony is that the investigation begins to turn the selfish younger reporter into a more principled man just as his mentor keeps sinking further into evil.

The movie was adapted from a novel by Samuel Fuller, the same Fuller that went on to direct Pickup on South Street and Shock Corridor. Before he went into movies, he was in journalism, starting work as a crime reporter at the age of 17. His experiences gave him a perfect insight into the workings of a journalist's world and he would return to the theme many times, from the obsessive, ambitious protagonist of Shock Corridor, convinced he'll win the Pulitzer to the dedicated, idealistic reporters of Park Row (Fuller's own favorite film). Fuller unfortunately did not adapt the screenplay for Scandal Sheet nor did he direct; it would have been a real pleasure to see Fuller's gritty, chaotic take on the misfits that live on the edges of scandal rags. Few noir directors had Fuller's affection for the sleazy and grimy back alleys of the city or his ability to characterize its twisted inhabitants without condescension. The only one I can compare him to is Jules Dassin but Dassin was always more elegant and broadly humanistic in his approach. Fuller is messy and eccentric and that's what makes his style so fun.

But if we can't have Fuller, director Phil Karlson is no slouch either. In fact, he's probably the film's biggest asset. Karlson's greatest gifts were pacing and control; his movies transition smoothly from scenes of talk to scenes of brutal shocking violence in a way that leaves you dizzy. His masterpiece The Phenix City Story is a prime example, slowly upping the ante with each killing and somehow managing to make each one a sadistic surprise. Here, he stages the initial killing with a striking shot of Chapman's wife moving around him, her voice rising to a shriek as she threatens him with the destruction of everything he's worked for. Karlson's camera follows her in a circle, as if the woman is literally walking in the shape of a noose. When she and Chapman begin to struggle, it feels truly violent, with the wife digging her nails into the man's hair. The fight ends with her cracking her head on a pipe and Karlson lingers on the agonized expression of her face.

Even better is Chapman's later killing of an innocent, alcoholic former reporter (Henry O'Neill). The man knows too much and can't be allowed to live. Another director might have framed the scene to allow Broderick Crawford's threatening bulk to overwhelm the older O'Neill. Karlson keeps them in a merciless extreme closeup, cutting between Crawford's shadowed face and O'Neill's immediate awareness of his own death. The faces tell the whole story.

Faces are a constant visual theme in Scandal Sheet. Karlson keeps returning to extreme closeups throughout the film, allowing scenes to play out through the changing expressions of the actors. He also collects interesting faces to populate the film, from the beaten-down but elaborately made-up former wife (Rosemary DeCamp) to the pop-eyed drunk that comes with information. One of the more striking shots of the movie is a scene where McCleary goes to question the local alcoholics and Karlson lets the camera travel slowly down the bar, letting us look closely at each man's face, seeing the wrinkles and shadows and disappointments that make up these men's lives. That single shot tells us so much about how society and the glib McCleary view these men, while letting us see the barhounds' grim humanity. The whole movie in fact, hinges on people's ability to remember faces. It's that which trips Chapman up and it's his fatal flaw. He's so focused on circulation numbers and suckers and slobs that he can never truly see the faces, only the figures.

I've had an allergy to Broderick Crawford since Born Yesterday. His one-note, blustery, growly performance and lack of comic timing just dragged scene after scene through the cement mixer. Thankfully, Scandal Sheet asks him to play it cool and contained so the shouting is kept to a minimum here. As the editor and unwilling murderer Mark Chapman, Crawford is gruff but professional, careful to keep his frustrations under wraps. He conveys the man's growing panic mostly through the eyes, his gaze shifting away just a little too fast when someone tries to bring up a new angle on the Lonelyhearts Murder. Chapman ends up as the embodiment of "win-at-all-costs" journalism, a man whose disregard for the human beings behind the circulation numbers will be his undoing. Complete scum but Crawford finds a note of pathos in the man's ultimate fate.

What Crawford can't convey, however, is the kind of sleazy charisma that elevated other "evil journalist" films like Sweet Smell of Success and Ace in the Hole. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas were black of heart but nobody could doubt their smarts, the pleasure they took in working over the masses. They were con man, but you couldn't help admiring their style. Broderick Crawford has bull-headed determination on his side, but no allure. This really deadens the impact of the film's central relationship; the one between Chapman and his slick, admiring protege McCleary. Crawford just doesn't seem believable as the object of someone's hero worship. Put someone like Robert Ryan in his place and it would make more sense.

John Derek's performance as Steve McCleary has the opposite problem. While Crawford's performance only really becomes great at the end, Derek's only really great in the beginning. He's perfectly suited as the callow reporter, so convinced of his charm and appeal that he can hustle Donna Reed into buying him dinner and dismiss her in the same breath. Derek's long lashes and skinny good looks seem bizarrely contemporary for a mid-century film; he's almost drowning in the heavy overcoats of the period. You could CGI him into any random CW show today and he'd fit right in. Still, the man carries off McCleary's fast-paced dialogue and smug reactions well; it's like watching a man bang around in a sports car, not even realizing how much he's scratching up the paint job. Derek's on shakier ground when McCleary has to discover sincerity. The movie doesn't set up any great chemistry between him and Crawford and Derek can't supply the emotional depth on his own. You imagine something like the relationship between Edward G. Robinson and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Scandal Sheet could have been a great film.

But if I'm faulting the movie for not achieving greatness, that's only because it so often seems close to getting there. The screenplay crackles with the kind of sharp, zinging lines that's essential to any great newspaper movie. "Don't count your steaks before you hear the sizzle." "I always said you were born in a field of shamrocks." "You're still too big for Dead End Street." "Does the judge's needle sew anything up?" "Everything but knotting the thread at the end...I mean the noose." The movie is full of clever details that add greatly to the atmosphere and themes. For example, The Lonelyhearts Ball lures couples to the altar with the promise of a bed with a built-in television set (oh great shades of the reality shows to come). The newspaper office is overshadowed by a giant clock that marks the rising circulation numbers. The numbers grow with the Lonelyhearts Murder Coverage, just as Chapman's time starts to run out. There's a lot of creativity and a lot of intelligence at work here. Ultimately the movie ends up as a good, sharp noir that promises a little more than it can deliver. But then, every journalist knows that it's not just the story. It's how you tell it. And Scandal Sheet does a fine job at that.

Favorite Quote:

"We got a new man on this beat that's built like you between the ears. He saw a hole in the back of the dame's skull and figured she was slugged." 

Favorite Scene:

The final confrontation. Karlson manages to take a climax that would be disappointingly basic, a simple case of a man remembering one crucial detail while the murderer foolishly hangs around rather than making a break for it, and makes it completely riveting. Everything plays out in tight closeups, with Broderick Crawford sliding in and out of the shadows. You can see his last shreds of hope warring with his fear as he tries, futilely, to hide his too-famous face from view. All while his protege slowly comes to realize that the man he's idolized has been a stranger all along. It's slow and suspenseful and finishes on a wickedly smart final image, a fitting riposte to the career of Mark Chapman, the man who traded in scandal.

Final Six Words:

Gives new meaning to "screaming headlines"