Hans Christian Andersen (film: USA, 1952), announces itself not as a biopic, but as a fairy tale about the Danish spinner of fairy tales. Within a framing narrative about a trip to Copenhagen are embedded songs and a ballet that bring to the screen a few of Andersen's 156 tales. As played by Danny Kaye, Hans is whimsical, charming, innocent, and fonder of making up fanciful stories than of getting on with his work as a cobbler. Persuaded to leave the town of Odense because his storytelling is keeping the children away from school, he goes to Copenhagen and meets a little match girl, a chimney sweep, and other characters he will one day write about.
When he gets a job making shoes for the Danish State Ballet's prima ballerina, Doro, he immediately falls in love with her. Seeing her quarrelling with her husband, who is also the impresario, Hans mistakenly assumes that they hate each other and writes ‘The Little Mermaid’ as an expression both of his love and of his belief that she is married to the wrong man. The story reaches Doro who, unaware of its meaning for Hans, accepts it simply as the basis for a new ballet. Next season the production opens to great acclaim, but Hans at last realizes that he has deluded himself. Doro will never love him. Dejected and wiser, he returns to Odense only to find that, as a published author, he is now welcomed even by the schoolmaster.
Among the Frank Loesser songs that wrap up Andersen tales as memorable, hummable nuggets are ‘The King's New Clothes’ (changed for metrical reasons from ‘The Emperor's New Clothes’); ‘Thumbelina’, which Hans makes up and performs, using his thumbs as visual aids, for a lonely little girl he sees outside the jail where he is languishing; and ‘The Ugly Duckling’, sung to a shaven‐headed boy who is being mocked and shunned by his schoolmates.
The songs, however, are secondary to the 15‐minute Little Mermaid cine‐ballet, which is the emotional centrepiece of the film. Danced by the newcomer Zizi Jeanmaire and the film's choreographer, Roland Petit, to music by Liszt, it has 28 supporting dancers and six vast sets. Its text is not authentic Andersen: already tweaked by the screenplay so that Hans can think of it as being simply about a woman who seeks love in the wrong place, it is further modified to accommodate the limitations of ballet. The mermaids' tails have to be imagined, for if they really had them they would not be able to dance. Likewise, the heroine cannot leave her voice behind with the witches, for as a dancer she has none; she is therefore able to get from the witches a magic veil which makes her human, without having to give anything in payment. And at the end, having not been recognized by the prince as his saviour, she is free to run back into the waves and resume mermaid form without fear of dissolving into foam.
Andersen did in fact come from Odense, but otherwise the film, as it admits, offers no reliable information about him or his stories. It does, however, give an accurate depiction of the screen Danny Kaye at the height of his career.
— Terry Staples
