There are two kinds of clowns in this world: the kind that makes you laugh, and the kind that makes you question your life choices at 3 a.m. Merry Andrew is a film about both—and the punchline is wearing a mortarboard and juggling existential dread. Directed by first-timer Michael Kidd, and starring Danny Kaye in his most aggressively whimsical form, this MGM curiosity is a musical, a romance, a circus comedy, and a loosely disguised parable about father issues… all set in the rolling hills of Not-Quite-England (read: MGM’s backlot). It’s a film where Danny Kaye dances with lions, sings geometry songs, and makes a romantic triangle out of a chimpanzee, a statue of Pan, and a woman named Letitia. If that sentence sounds exhausting, you’re already halfway through the film.
🎓 MGM’s Circus of Compromises
By 1958, the golden age of movie musicals was wheezing like a calliope in the rain. Merry Andrew wasn’t a last gasp, but it was a final chuckle—one that landed somewhere between clever and cringeworthy. Adapted from Paul Gallico’s short story The Romance of Henry Menafee, the film was rewritten by Isobel Lennart and I.A.L. Diamond, who would go on to write Some Like It Hot—a comedy that Merry Andrew decidedly is not. Michael Kidd, legendary choreographer and Tony-winning Broadway darling, was handed the directorial reins, presumably because the suits at MGM thought, “If he can get Gene Kelly to leap over hay bales, surely he can handle Danny Kaye and a lion.”
This marked Kidd’s first and only directorial outing. His musical numbers bounce like a caffeinated pogo stick, but the narrative sections slog like a Latin declension test. You can feel Kidd’s comfort zone ending the moment no one’s pirouetting. He stages the dance numbers with gleeful athleticism, and then retreats into clumsy staging when people start talking. The pacing is like circus peanuts: oddly chewy, questionably sweet, and best consumed sparingly.
🎭 When Clowns Court Classicism
Danny Kaye plays Andrew Larabee, a schoolteacher with a bad British accent, a worse love life, and a terminal case of quirk. He’s the kind of man who quotes Pythagoras, wears a bowler hat, and stumbles ass-first into the lion’s den—literally. Kaye is the film’s solar flare: high-wattage, occasionally blinding, but undeniably magnetic when allowed to riff or juggle. Whether he’s singing about the “Square of the Hypotenuse” or making chimps relevant to archaeology, Kaye commits like a man auditioning for tenure in the Department of Goofy Professor Studies.
Enter Pier Angeli as Selena Gallini, a circus performer with an Italian accent and a doomed aura so strong it could bend spoons. Tragically, both she and Patricia Cutts—Kaye’s uptight fiancée Letitia—would die by suicide within two decades, casting a retrospective shadow over the film’s playful romantic entanglements. Angeli, previously seen twirling above Kirk Douglas in The Story of Three Loves, is luminous but underused, playing second fiddle to a chimp named Angelina and a statue with more narrative payoff than most of the supporting cast.
Shot largely on the well-worn Tait College set of MGM’s backlot (moonlighting once again as generic British countryside), the film looks expensive but oddly claustrophobic. It wants to be Roman Holiday with pratfalls, but settles for Good News with juggling. The centerpiece—Kaye accidentally becoming a circus ringmaster in an inflatable vest—plays like a deleted scene from The Pink Panther directed by your well-meaning uncle who just discovered improv.
🎬 Tickety-Boo or Ticked Off?
Critics were kind, if not generous. Bosley Crowther called it “ample entertainment,” which in Crowther-speak is somewhere between “forgettable” and “better than a root canal.” Variety praised the songs but noted Kidd’s weakness in comic pacing—a polite way of saying the plot moves like molasses down a trapeze wire. The soundtrack, featuring lyrics by Johnny Mercer and music by Saul Chaplin, holds up better than the film itself. “Pipes of Pan” and “Chin Up, Stout Fellow” are exactly the kind of cheerful anthems you’d expect to hear while being slowly suffocated by a clown balloon.
Financially, the film limped. Despite an exotic premiere in Singapore and a stint at Radio City Music Hall, it logged a loss of $837,000—proof that MGM’s formula of “add music and stir” was no longer the surefire recipe it had been a decade earlier. In retrospect, Merry Andrew is less a cornerstone and more a curiosity, a reminder that even major stars like Kaye could get lost in a studio system struggling to balance art, commerce, and increasingly ridiculous plot devices
Today, Merry Andrew exists in that twilight zone of cinema history where cult fandom meets historical footnote. It’s remembered by musical completists, Danny Kaye devotees, and those who like their romantic comedies with a strong side of Roman ruins, chimp-assisted archaeology, and schoolboy rebellion. It’s also remembered—hauntingly—for being the last film of Walter Kingsford and Naomi Childers, and for showcasing two radiant actresses who would die too young. The film practically dances over a minefield of unintended tragedy.
🎤 Clowning Past the Graveyard
Merry Andrew is a film that winks so hard, it sprains something. It’s goofy, uneven, and terminally theatrical—like watching someone try to tap-dance through a Shakespeare seminar. It has its charms, mostly when Danny Kaye is allowed to cut loose, but for every clever lyric, there’s a groaner of a plot twist involving angry Italians and misidentified Roman artifacts. A curiosity worth watching once, especially if you’re in the mood for circus acts and existential crises with a musical number or two. But after it’s over, you’ll be more “tickety-boo” if you don’t dig too deep.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)
#ClownCollege #DannyKaye #MGMBacklot #CircusOfErrors #MusicalOddities #TicketyBooAndBarbiturates #ThreeStarsAndAShrug
