The Little Match Girl (1928) User Reviews

Light up your life

[Spondonman · 8/10 · 27 September 2007]

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.

Bleak adaption of famous story

[Gblakelii · 8/10 · 2 January 2006]

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.

Visually striking, moving and poetic

[OldAle1 · 8/10 · 22 September 2007]

I have to disagree somewhat with the general assessment of Catherine Hessling's portrayal here; sure, she is no small girl but she does I think a good job of portraying the innocence, naïveté and poverty necessary to the role. If anything, this is my favorite of her early performances, perhaps excepting "Whirlpool of Fate"; I guess I buy her in the waifish role.

At any rate, this is first-rate as a visual fantasy, starting from the opening model-shots of the city walls and train, obviously fake but pretty good for the era. The early scenes of the match-girl wandering, looking in at the wealthy diners in a restaurant, are as mentioned reminiscent of Chaplin -- and for that matter of a great many silent melodramas; the later fantasy sequence as she hallucinates in the snow is more avant-garde and might remind one of both German and Russian models (probably because the French experimental films of the silent era are lesser-known today); using Mussorgsky and Wagner for the musical choices (along with a bit of Mozart's Turkish March, I think) helps cement the association.

The finish is shockingly bleak and cold, reminding us that for all of his good humor and joie de vivre, Renoir like Twain never forgot the worst in humanity.

Dance macabre....

[dbdumonteil · 3 April 2006]

Hans Christian Andersen's "little match girl" is a tale so famous in the whole world it would be an insult to the users'culture to summarize the story.What is obvious in Renoir's adaptation is the disappearance of the Christian spirit (no pun intended).Its conclusion was not that much pessimistic:the heroine and her grandma meet up in Heaven ,a place where hunger and the cold are unknown.

There is not a single hint at "pie in the sky" in Renoir's screenplay.Casting Catherine Hess -his favorite actress of the silent era ("Nana") as well as his father Auguste's model- forced the director to make his heroine older.The first part,in the streets where rich people enjoy a life a luxury in restaurants where they Despise the Poor ,displays Charlie Chaplin's influence.These shots of Hessling behind the pane are essentially Chaplinesque.

But the second part is fantasy and horror :the heroine's hallucinations ,which were full of tenderness and compassion in the short story , are dreamlike,maleficent and even ominous."Alice in wonderland" meets death instead of the Queen of Hearts.The toys might signify a return to the kingdom of childhood but they could also indicate that man is a puppet into the hands of a superior strength he does not really understand.

The Danse Macabre -which is actually a Macabre ride ,with the heroine perhaps knocking on Heaven's door- predates Ingmar Bergman's "the seventh seal " by thirty years.It's all there including the grave where the match girl will return to ashes and dust .On the street ,people find the dead body.

"Are people naive enough to think they can warm up with some measly matches?" they say.

That night,the gates of Heaven were closed.

A short that shows that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest geniuses of the French cinema.

Gorgeous innovative filming and editing, rough on purpose, dark!

[secondtake · 7/10 · 11 November 2014]

The Little Match Girl (1928)

A forty minute silent film by Jean Renoir.

Oddly gripping and almost gruesome, this short fable based on a Hans Christian Anderson story, is almost impressionistic in its black and white crudeness. We will assume it's all intentional, the odd cuts, the simple effects, the lack of focus and generally rough textures. Certainly from 2014 this is what makes the movie distinctive and at times remarkable.

The story taken literally is simple—a poor girl trying to sell matches is a failure, and cold, and as the snow falls she is shivering and hallucinating and eventually she falls asleep. We enter her head along the way (we see her hallucinations, then her dreams) and have a little girl's notions of being rescued, of her idea of being happy, run up against Death itself.

Much of this last third of the film is made of layered images, double exposures of different kinds, and it's quite a mind trip, and a visual astonishment. The liberties Renoir takes are fabulous, and totally refreshing. If you compare to films made by Hollywood or by the German Expressionists in 1928 or so you'll see such a difference in attitude and style it's breathtaking. Or shocking, at least.

You can easily brush this off as crude and incompetent, especially in the first overwrought scenes as the girl is trying to sell her matches, but that's missing the point. Renoir wasn't making a slick movie with high production values and therefore a kind of technical invisibility. He wants the movie-making itself to show. (This parallels the Germans, but Remoir's style is soft and surreal, not expressive and angular.)

And so from an American perspective this is almost an experimental film. But Renoir of course is on his way to some of the masterpiece of French cinema, like "Rules of the Game," and we are seeing his brilliant and original feeling for the medium unfold before our eyes here.

If you like difference (for its own sake) or like Renoir (the son, the moviemaker), or like to see a late silent short that has some wonderful ideas going on, watch this. It's clumsy and imperfect, no doubt. But how much is intentional is up to the viewer.

Quite beautiful.

[planktonrules · 9/10 · 30 April 2012]

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.

"How stupid to think you can warm up with matches"

[ackstasis · 7/10 · 26 September 2008]

'The Little Match Girl (1928)' is my very first film from director Jean Renoir, and, even to me, it seems like quite an odd place to start. A silent fantasy short film, this effort probably bears no resemblance to the rest of Renoir's output, but it does nonetheless show a fair amount of promise, which means I've got plenty to look forward to. Adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's 1845 fairy tale – which, I must confess, I don't recall ever knowing – this film plays out as a decent but amateur attempt at surrealism; it's certainly a far cry from the outstanding Expressionism that Germany had already mastered by the early 1920s, and is rather plain in comparison with the year's finest American surrealistic work, Watson and Webber's 'The Fall of the House of Usher (1928).' Additionally, there's a jarring tonal mismatch between the film's two distinct halves, but, taking each half separately, Renoir and co-director Jean Tédesco do a fair job of creating atmosphere, and there are certainly some magnificent individual sequences.

On New Year's Eve, an impoverished girl (Catherine Hessling, then Renoir's wife) is sent out into the bitter cold to sell boxes of matches. Her failure to make a single sale is touching in the same way as a Chaplin film, as poor Karen, frozen and hungry, stands shivering in the snow, peering through fogged-up glass at the wealthy families enjoying their hot meals. The whole setting also reminded me of Lubitsch's 'The Shop Around the Corner (1940),' in which the lonely shop-owner loiters around in a snowstorm to find some companionship on Christmas Eve. A kindly policeman offers Karen his sympathy, but her purse remains as empty as before, and, afraid to return home without any earnings, she retreats into the snow and attempts to keep warm by lighting matches. It is here that Renoir shifts tones, somewhat untidily, and the girl's dreamy hallucinations open up a fantastic world of oddities and, later on, terrors. Death, in the form of an average-looking guy in a black costume, comes a'riding.

Catherine Hessling, though 28-years-old at the time, doesn't look much over twenty, and possesses the delicate innocence of an actress like Lilian Gish, making her ideal in the main role. The supporting roles aren't particularly noteworthy, but Jean Bachelet's visuals are frequently breathtaking. 'The Little Match Girl,' to its credit, makes terrific use of optical effects, employing slow- and reverse-motion, time-lapse photography (for a brief shot of blooming flowers) and double-exposure to great effect. The film's centrepiece, set to the rousing notes of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," involves a mid-air flight on horseback from the black spectre of Death. Thematically, this film predates Bergman's 'The Seventh Seal (1957)' by nearly thirty years, though this Death doesn't look nearly as memorable as Bengt Ekerot. The ending is also suitably pessimistic, and much less reassuring than the original story, in which, I hear, the girl ascends to Heaven with her grandmother, where hunger and cold are nonexistent. I loved how, in the final shift from fantasy back to bitter reality, the falling rose petals faded into snow crystals.

A fantastic piece of imaginative work

[limshun · 8/10 · 5 April 2008]

While short and perhaps lacking in real pathos (for me), this is a great example of the sheer imaginative fun that movies rarely possess nowadays. From a horse-back sword fight in the sky to snow that turns into fruit, fantasy reigns supreme in this film. Catherine Hesslinger is captivating in the lead role (though she is even more remarkable in the less interesting "Charleston"). Seeing these silent shorts of Renoir's have helped me understand how he was capable of putting so many wonderful, unusual scenes into "The Rules of the Game"; I see how playful he was. Above all, one takes away Renoir's exuberant love for film in this movie. You can find it in the 7 film set released by Lion's Gate with remarks by Scorsese.

THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL (Jean Renoir, 1928) **1/2

[Bunuel1976 · 6/10 · 7 June 2007]

A stylish short-film updating of the popular Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale accompanied by a score that includes excerpts from two celebrated classical pieces – Wagner's "The Walkyrie" and Moussorgsky's "Night On Bald Mountain". Catherine Hessling (naturally) is an affecting if over-age lead and, once again, the film was originally longer but its initial run was interrupted by a plagiarism suit and it was only two years later that it was eventually re-released as we know it today!

While obviously commenting on the class struggle and the inevitable hand of fate – themes which, interestingly enough, resurfaced via a very similar plot-line in the first episode of Renoir's directorial swan song, the made-for-TV THE LITTLE THEATRE OF JEAN RENOIR (1970) – the accent here is once again on special effects enacting the titular character's dream sequence in a toy shop, which culminates in a chase across the skies involving the girl and two rival military officers on horseback (which, curiously enough, brought to mind the melodramatic excesses of the fantasy sequences in the later Powell & Pressburger films!

Moving and dreamlike

[Adrian Sweeney · 9/10 · 13 March 2009]

I just stumbled on this early and silent Renoir short (along with the delightfully bizarre 'Sur un air de Charleston') on a DVD of 'La Grand Illusion' and, really, I think I love it more even than that great film.

It's loosely based on 'The Little Match Girl' but owes as much to 'The Nutcracker'; a poor match-seller (played by Mrs. Renoir, the absolutely gorgeous and appealing Catherine Hessling, who can also be seen in 'Charleston'), overcome with hunger and cold, hallucinates the inhabitants of a toyshop window coming to life around her. I imagine the animation and other special effects must have been fairly pioneering - I'm certain they're more spellbinding than anything CGI could do - and the result is magical, enchanting, heartbreaking.

The version I saw had a haunting, note-perfect accordion soundtrack by Marc Perrone.

Much as I love his other work I could almost wish Renoir had gone on like this; I could wish cinema had gone on like this.

Early Renoir

[JoeytheBrit · 6/10 · 15 February 2010]

This short early silent from the French master Renoir shows a good deal of imagination on the director's part – although not in terms of casting: he once more looked no further than his then wife Catherine Hessling whom he was trying to build into a star for the lead role. Hessling is too old for the part, but at times she does manage to convey a degree of innocence required for the role, even if it does mean her performance borders on the (deliberately) comical at times. This being an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's tragic short story, these brief light-hearted moments are at odds with the general theme.

The second part of the film veers off into fantasy as we're treated to the girl's childlike fantasies as she slowly freezes to death. Again, there's a good deal of imagination gone into this sequence, but it does become a little repetitive after a while. The spectre of Death, initially in the form of a Jack-in-the-Box, looms over the fantasies, however, until the film climaxes with a concisely edited chase sequence on horseback.

This is a curious choice of story for Renoir, and it obviously doesn't reach the standard of his later output. However, it possesses a Gallic charm that sets it apart from most films of the era, and is worth catching simply to see a master of cinema near the beginning of his cinematic career.

One Of The Cruellest Stories Ever Written For Children

[FerdinandVonGalitzien · 8/10 · 3 July 2006]

"La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes" ( The Little Match Girl ) was directed in 1928 by the great but frenchified film director, Jean Renoir and is based on the homonymous and one of the cruelest stories ever written for children, proletarians or aristocrats alike( this German Count remembers very well even today the stormy night when the nanny told this aristocrat that sadistic story…) and is from the pen of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Fortunately Herr Renoir is a more civilized ( despite being French… ) person and softens the story about of the little match girl ( well… Damen Catherine Hessling is pretty old for such role… ) who grows stiff with cold on a snowy night. The film has beautiful sets that enhance the atmosphere and spirit of the classic fairy tale, especially the playroom, full of amazing toys that every child in the world would wish. The director manipulates the backgrounds and sizes of the different toys so that they can be alternately playful or threatening. The dream sequence in which the little match girl flees on a horse to the clouds with her toy soldier is a remarkable, thrilling and poetic sequence with astonishing editing is full of many, different angles up and down giving the scene a very fluid feel. Of course it all finishes in a terrible way for the little match girl but thanks to the Herr Renoir mastery it's a beautiful ending with a moving lyrical feeling. Only 30 minutes are enough for Herr Jean Renoir to create an exceptional film adaptation, classical and evocative and which more than overcomes Herr Andersen harsh intentions. And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must order his servants never again ignite the chimney with matches.

I think the name is misleading, but still a lovely picture!

[jkmm8192001 · 6/10 · 30 July 2009]

Well if I may add my two cents I agree this is not what the little Match girl was suppose to be. It gives me a feel of a babes in toy land and the nut cracker personally. It is still very pretty and I enjoyed the animation.The toy solders moving around in the stop go animation was done wonderfully! I thought the actresses were down right lovely and performed well. I really loved the actresses dress as dolls dancing. Just lovely, what else can I say. It is a lovely film. As a version of the match girl the film fails. However it is still a lovely peace despite the name issue. If you can look past that,its an enjoyable film. There's my two cents for you!

I like the tale, but not here

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 22 April 2016]

"La petite marchande d'allumettes" is a pretty old, French black-and-white silent film version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Matchgirl". Unfortunately, I did not really enjoy the watch here. I saw some versions of the tale, but this one here is among the weakest. of course, this is almost 90 years old and the story with the snow and the fire and the illusion is one that requires color to work really nicely. Apart from that, the lead actress is everything but a little girl, which I personally did not like. The makers, including Jean Renoir, obviously tried their best, but it is not working out. It says 40 minutes, but the version i saw only went for 32, maybe more frames per second. In any case, it felt still way too long and dragged on several occasions. I personally cannot recommend it. Thumbs down.

Shedding second skin

[chaos-rampant · 23 September 2011]

This is adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen story about a neglected, destitute matchbox girl who turns to light for a last flight of fancy. So how to transmute suffering into something that matters and we can take from?

It's so perfectly tailored for cinematic language of the time, sentimental but not daft; an outer story about hard-hitting emotional drama, ostensibly realistic but itself imbued with the afterglow of fairy-tales, and the canvas nested inside the mind that permits all manner of fantastic associations between the two fantasies.

The cruel father who sends her out to sell every night, is beautifully rendered as only a dark silhouette behind a window. Once out in the snowed street, the only one who notices the girl is the policeman. In their brief moment of intimacy before a shopping window they identify each other as toys behind the glass panel. It's good to note the distance they feel separates them, and therefore prohibits the romance, because it's repeated, then reversed inside the fantasy. They are again faraway, but eventually - imagined - very close.

The fantasy is brilliant, but first seems rather uninspired, the magic uncinematically transferred to the set design. But what seems at first as stuffy is revealed to be stuffy for a reason; the feeling is one of stasis and regression, the toys are life-like in size, so the girl reduced to their stature, hiding among them, finally finding love that extricates from the infantile level. Then a premonition of Death as the casting of the first shadow, here is where it soars and takes to the skies.

This second part truly amazes; Renoir does not merely transmute on the symbolic level by transferring notions between worlds, he transmutes for the eye as well. This heavenly world is in flux, rapid, violent. So we have a delirious flight of fancy as the couple flees from Death, a struggle, and eventually the capitulation.

You can read all of this as the wish-fulfillment of a suffering mind, the fluid dream world providing guidance from inside, or a spiritual blueprint with those things nested inside of it.

Eventually the cross, the rod of suffering, is transmuted in the tree of new life. We may think the blossoms spring up wistfully, because the fairy-tale calls for it, and perhaps for the filmmakers they were merely the proper symbols, but it is not quite so. Fairy-tales communicate something of our very soul, not the opposite. A common soul on her journeys through the world.

So, on an unconscious level, a sacrifice here points the road to the required breakthrough. The girl growing into a woman, then growing out of that too, and is a river its bank or the flowing water? Watch it again.

Oh the humanity...

[LobotomousMonk · 8/10 · 16 February 2013]

La Petite Marchande D'Allumettes is another of Renoir's bleak portrayals of meek and meager lives at odds with their milieu. Something about it though feels like a re-hashing of earlier Renoir works (Une Vie and La Fille...even Nana). This piece was filmed in the Vieux-Colombier and produced by Tedesco. I conjecture (or just straight up fantasize) that the pair brainstormed on a film concept that was to be "suited" for Renoir and Hessling together. I imagine the idea of adapting a famous tale (Andersen's short story) as a compromise (never a great way to produce art imo)... and what you get is something not quite original in any way whatsoever. Now, that isn't to say that the French Impressionist film techniques used in the hallucination sequences are not constructed and crafted with technical precision and genius intuition... but that it was already fertile ground for Renoir (and Hessling for that matter). I have previously hypothesized that some of Renoir's silent work was prophecy and prognostication through forming a death allegory between human freedom and the film industry itself. This may have been the last time that Renoir favored a stylistic system constructed around a protagonist's psychology and showcasing avant-garde editing techniques (impossible to say without a full print of Le Tournoi available). Certainly, Renoir's next film, Tire au Flanc would begin a shift toward a dominant stylistic system and diegetic construction (characterized by depth of field, mobile framing, multiple protagonists, etc.) that marked Renoir as a unique and exceptional filmmaker. Interesting also, that it was not sound film production that spurred this stylistic shift for Renoir as Tire was a silent film (although, I do believe it may have been the imminence of sound film that also had Renoir thinking one step ahead).

Impressions of a Not-So-Little Girl

[Cineanalyst · 8/10 · 23 November 2020]

Jean Renoir's "The Little Match Girl" despite being only about 32 minutes (although some sources list it as 40 minutes, the version circulating online isn't as long) is still an extended, loose reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's short, fairy-tale poem. The first obvious difference is that the "Karen," as played by Catherine Hessling, the director's wife, is not a little girl, but rather a woman in her twenties. Granted, the silent era was a time when adult stars the likes of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish often played childhood roles or perpetual ingénues, but the casting here is striking relative to other cinematic adaptations of the short story, which had already been made into films in 1902 and 1914, at least. It should also be noted that the original French title, "La petite marchande d'allumettes," better translates as "The Little Match Seller." The casting also opens the story up for a quasi-love triangle involving Karen's infatuation with a well-dressed man and her interactions with a policeman, both of whom are also reflected in the film's extended death dream. Her matchstick hallucinations actually get comparatively short shrift this outing, which I'm not fond of given the projected visions' power as cinematic metaphor, but Renoir largely makes up for this with that dream sequence, which pulls out all the tricks from the era of French Impressionist filmmaking.

There is use of miniatures for the shack, practical effects are employed for a falling tree, actors play living dolls, and the wintry city sets are effective. The adjustments of lens focus, use of substitution-splices and, most of all, multiple-exposure photography or matte work creates some impressive impressionistic effects. The chase on horseback in the sky in particular is haunting. What else stood out to me viewing this after having already seen the single-scene 1902 adaptation by James Williamson, as well as the 1914 version, is how masterful film technique had became in the 1920s, especially in the hands of a great filmmaker like Renoir, as well as his cinematographer Jean Bachelet. The views and continuity editing based around looks is exceptional. A lot of glossy close-ups, eyeline matches, point-of-view and subjective shots and images framed through windows--and that's just before the matchstick hallucinations and extended dream sequence.

Casting an adult woman also works rather well to modernize Andersen's mid-19th-century tale. It extends the polemic beyond a cry to charity for the idealized blameless child, sharpening the critique on modern urbanity and capitalism. Automobiles and novelty toys are incorporated. My only complaint besides not more time being spent on the matchstick visions is that it's not clear why Karen doesn't go back to her shack. This is explained in other versions with her father and, sometimes, her mother being abusive, and I wonder whether this film weren't originally longer to provide such a reason. Someone else's arm--perhaps the father--can be seen when Karen exits the shack, but in the version I saw no such character remains. Anyways, Hessling was surely a more capable actress, too, than a child would have been, even if I'm not necessarily impressed by her reliance on head bobs and bug eyes. No longer simply playing to the Christian, nostalgic and paternal instincts of Andersen's sermon to save the children, when Renoir's Karen inevitably dies, she receives no sympathy in this world.

Early Renoir

[Michael_Elliott · 26 February 2008]

Little Match Girl, The (1928)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Jean Renoir's short film based on the story of Hans Christian Anderson features the director's then wife Catherine Hessling in the title role. The film tells the story of a poor girl who goes out on a snowy night to sell matches. She's unable to sell any and instead of going back to her shack, she stays out keeping warm from the matches. She strikes one lucky match and begins to see all sorts of strange things through a toy shop window. This film starts off pretty well but slowly gets boring as the surreal aspects of the story start to set in. The fantasy side of things are pretty good but it's clear Renoir was going for something a tad bit surreal and the budget just didn't allow for this to work. All of the fantasy sequences are good on their own but none of them are done well enough to really work. Hessling is much too old to be playing the character but she is able to bring an innocence to the role.