The most colorful and the costliest of 1952's movies, Hans Christian Andersen, is based on the life of a gentle, unassuming dane whose great talent was spinning stories for little children. The peculiar charm of Andersen's fairy tales lies in their combination of the airy and unreal with the earthy and familiar. This pictures, taken by Gjon Mili on the movie set, show how the film tries to re-create that combination.
Producer Samuel Goldwyn, who had long planned to do a film on Andersen's life, was encouraged by the fabulous success of a british movie based on Andersen's The red shoes. Goldwyn spent $4 million on the project, gathering an array of all-star talent - Moss Hart to write the script, Frank Loesser to set famous tales to music, Danny Kaye to play Andersen, Renee Jeanmarie to dance in Roland's Petit's ballets. And he built huge sets including the eerie undersea palace of a mermaid princess.
The little mermaid, one of the most poignant of Andersen's tales, is the subject of a 17-minute ballet which is the film's climax. With the aid of metal harnesses and invisible wire, 16 dancers float, dive and drift around green-lit stage decorated with a mile of fish netting, giant shells, wrecked ships and other flotsam.
Cheerful whirl of tutus and tights in the Royal Danish Ballet entrances Hans Christian Andersen when he first arrives in Copenhagen from his country town of Odense.
Movie Andersen, as played by Danny Kaye, is a cobbler who perches cheerfully in front of the king's statue in a square in Copenhagen to sing praises of his wares.
The movie's Hans Christian Andersen has little in common with the real one except name, and his story sounds like one of the master's plots. He is a cobbler who becomes infatuated with a prima ballerina. Out of his hopeless love he writes the story of The Little Mermaid, who falls in love with a human, follows him to dry land and kills herself when he chooses another woman. The movie's despairing lover, less dramatically, goes back to storytelling. The real Andersen was somewhat eccentric, but many danes thought it sacrilegious to put the still more eccentric Danny Kaye in the part. However, his performance is engagingly restrained.
A forlorn lover, Andersen comes to realize that the girl he loves (Renee Jeanmarie) is really in love with her husband and ballet master (Farley Granger).
Happy mermaid runs to palace of hr beloved prince, where she will find disappointment and death.
_______________________________________
photos and documentation: LIFE Magazine (US) | Zetu Harrys collection.
0 Comments