The Little Match Girl (1928)

• Year: 1928
• Released: 08 Jun 1928
• Country: France
• Adwords: N/A
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019267/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_little_match_girl
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: None, French
• MPA Rating: N/A
• Genre: Short, Drama, Fantasy
• Runtime: 40 min
• Writer: Hans Christian Andersen, Jean Renoir
• Director: Jean Renoir, Jean Tédesco
• Cast: Catherine Hessling, Eric Barclay, Jean Storm
• Keywords: black and white, short film,

7.1/10

The Little Match Girl Storyline

A young match girl falls into a dream state in which she enters a kind of giant toy shop, and interacts with the toys, including the captain of the wooden soldiers, but is then menaced by Death, who appears out of a jack-in-the-box wearing a kind of “pirate” outfit with a Death skull on his hat. A chase ensues, and the girl “falls back” to reality.—Unifrance

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The Little Match Girl Movie Reviews

Bleak adaption of famous story

Although this version hits on many of the points in the original story, there is no doubt that this is director Jean Renoir’s very own interpretation. He perhaps outdoes Hans Christian Andersen in conveying a harsh reality with little or no recompense. The finale is heavy laden with symbolism of which might have been some influence to Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane”. Renoir himself seems to have been influenced by Andersen’s “Steadfast Tin Soldier” and Victor Herbert’s “Babes in Toyland(1903)”. And the life size dolls remind one of Maria in “Metropolis(German, 1927)”. The New Year’s story should be familiar to most- one sorrowful day in the life of a poor girl, without happiness at home nor on the job. This particular adaption presents a girl much older than seen elsewhere and is set in the present. Ranks a close third behind the 1937 cartoon and the near perfect 1986 British musical film. With sound effects and music, the latter used particularly well with a rendition of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”, which of course(to Western fans)was also used with great results in My Name Is Nobody(Italian, 1974). The video edition viewed had fair to good picture quality.

Light up your life

A very stylish outing from Jean Renoir spun from a simple children’s fable from Andersen into something even simpler but memorably bleak as well.

The little match girl of the title is not so little here in the beautiful Catherine Hessling giving a mesmerising performance for Renoir, who filmed her lovingly in soft or blurred focus throughout. The story moves logically from trying to sell matches to live to trying to light them to live, in between with a child-like pressed nose to a café then a toy shop’s window to living the dream while freezing to death in the snow. When your time’s up even sheltering from the falling snow under a single plank can be taken away from you. There’s some great low-key fancy camera and set trickery in the toy shop dream sequence such as Karen dancing in slo-mo through nets, and lovely smoky visuals especially the life and death chase through the sky. It can sometimes remind you of a silent pop video – the crew must had have fun piecing it all together!

Although it doesn’t say as much for human determination as Passion of Joan of Arc from the same year (what could!), I’ve always found anything by Renoir to be highly enjoyable, educational and a salutary lesson in how to make art not Art movies.

Quite beautiful.

This film was written and directed by Jean Renoir. It’s based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen (“Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne”). The film is a visual treat of the silent era–and looks more like an art film than I expected. Some of this probably is due to Renoir’s heritage (his father was the famous painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir). In several ways it differs from the Andersen story (the physical abuse is played way down and the child’s dead grandmother is not in this film and the girl is much older in the movie), but is otherwise pretty much the same.

The film begins in a northern city during the winter. A pretty young lady is forced to go into the snowy night to sell matches. She is very hungry and very cold–and no one seems to take much notice of her. Eventually, driven by her depleted condition, she sits down in the snow and begins to hallucinate about a better life. By the end of the film, she is found dead in the snow.

While this is a super-depressing story, it makes for good social commentary. It also gave Renoir lots of opportunity to use his artistic skills, as the hallucination sequence makes up nearly half the film and is quite surreal. While some of the techniques he used in the film seem a bit quaint and dated today, as a silent, it is a gorgeous thing–lovingly filmed and well worth your time. One of the great director’s best films. Fortunately, you can download it for free at archive.org.