Hans Christian Andersen’s "Tin Soldier" as Adapted by Jon Voight [by Joe Lehman]

In the early summer of 1996, just before I turned thirteen and a few years before the Internet conquered the world, I used to frequent several independently-owned video rental stores. One evening I rented a recently released VHS film titled The Tin Soldier, the only film that Jon Voight has directed as well as held the starring role.  It was apparent from its cover that the movie’s theme was geared toward someone exactly as old and in need of a lesson as I. Its official tagline read: “A modern-day fairy tale about old-fashioned courage.” 

Jon Voight found his inspiration in the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale The Steadfast Tin Soldier. In a child’s toy collection, a tin soldier with a hobbled leg falls in love with the paper ballerina placed nearby. The soldier falls from an open window and from then on must face a series of overwhelming obstacles as he attempts to return home to his ‘true love,’ the ballerina. 

The movie is not a direct adaptation. It contains the key elements of Andersen’s fable: a toy collection, featuring a one-legged tin soldier and a beautiful toy ballerina. But instead of Andersen’s nineteenth century Denmark, it is set in 1990s’ Los Angeles. As in the Andersen story there is a young boy, only here he has a name and a pensive personality. He is twelve-year-old Billy McClusky (Trenton Knight), a working class transplant from Detroit to L.A., whose recently widowed mother (Ally Sheedy) is a struggling waitress. The father’s death has caused a rift between mother and son. The two are sitting across from each other at the breakfast table. They are brooding silently.

It is Billy’s first day at the new middle school. Two youth gangs occupy turf in the school: Pack 13, which seems  predominantly made up of white ethnic kids, and the rival  Snakes, largely black, who are antagonistic toward Billy from the get-go.   Pack 13’s de facto leader, a burly thirteen-year-old, Clyde (Aeryk Egan), quickly recognizes Billy as plucky and resolute in spite of his being physically small. Clyde insists on recruiting Billy into his gang on a trial basis.

Billy wants to join the science club and to impress a pretty girl named Toni (Bethany Richards), who is equally attracted to him but disapproves of the gang. Upon school’s dismissal that first day, Snakes’ most volatile member, a boy nicknamed “Psycho” (Travis Perkins) chases Billy down the streets into a neighborhood antique toy store owned and operated by the kindly and eccentric Mr. Fallon (Dom DeLuise). Fallon immediately shoos Psycho off the premises  while Billy hides in a corner.

At the toy store, where the toy tin soldier and ballerina lie dormant on the shelves, Fallon lectures Billy on the virtue of showing respect for his elders. He encourages the boy to borrow the tin soldier, telling him that he might learn a few lessons about honesty, integrity and courage from possessing it for a while, as these are the principles the antiques represent. Billy reluctantly accepts the loaner.

At this point the movie takes an enchanted turn. Billy wakes up in the middle of the night to discover, much to his disbelief, that the toy has morphed into a real-life medieval knight named Yarik (Jon Voight), who speaks in Chaucer-style English and professes chivalry and righteousness. The fairy tale, which Hans Christian Andersen wrote in the nineteenth century, reflects a similar code of chivalric conduct and honor.

                  It is concerivable that there are super myths common to fairy tales, folk tales, and children's literature of whatever provenance. The theme of chivalric virtue is a central theme in both the fairy tale and the movie, and this made me turn to the pages of the medieval Song of Roland to seek out what are the traits of a noble knight. The medieval knight’s code of chivalry includes seventeen imperatives. Among them are to fear God and maintain His Church;  to serve the liege lord in valor and faith; to protect the weak and defenseless; to live by honor and for glory;  never to refuse a challenge from an equal; and never to turn the back upon a foe.

         The living and breathing tin soldier presents himself to Billy as a knight “of the Order of Fallon.” Billy is henceforth Yarik’s young squire. Only Billy can see Yarik. Like the tin soldier of the Hans Christian Andersen story, Yarik has come to life with an injured leg.

           At first, neither Billy nor Yarik has an idea of what Yarik’s purpose is. The shining knight looms invisibly over Billy at school suggesting correct answers to a teacher’s questions. But this seems hardly reason enough for Yarik’s presence.

           It is when Billy reveals to Yarik his crush on the lovely and sweet girl Toni that Yarik senses a common mission between them. Both lad and knight yearn for the love of a female. Yarik covets the ballerina Fallon has named Katrina and can sense the growing affection between Billy and Toni. Yarik’s quest is to connect the two adolescents.

           In Andersen’s original story, the tin soldier declares, “that is the wife for me. But she is too grand, and lives in a castle, while I have only a box to live in; [there are] five-and-twenty of us [soldiers] altogether, that is no place for her. Still I must try and make her acquaintance.” Andersen is incorporating the old ideals of chivalry and courtly love in this declaration, for these concepts require a seemingly unattainable romantic devotion.

           In The Steadfast Tin Soldier, the toy survives numerous existential threats. The children place it in a paper boat, where it is swept away at sea, swallowed by a large fish, and eventually is recovered by his owners when the fish is caught and cut open. As Andersen describes the scene: “The flames lighted up the tin soldier, as he stood, the heat was very terrible, but whether it proceeded from the real fire or from the fire of love he could not tell.” A cinder from the stove blows onto the paper ballerina and burns her up too. And so ends Andersen’s tale.


       In the movie, however, the sooner Yarik can complete his quest to unite the two kids, the sooner he will return to his toy-sized metal form and be reunited with his own love Katrina. Just as the steadfast tin soldier of Hans Christian Andersen’s imagination surmounts whatever obstacles fate throws his way, the movie’s knight Yarik must guide his squire through the pangs of adolescence, heavily complicated by his dilemma of avoiding the lure of the youth gangs. “The important thing is to choose your friends, and don’t let them choose you,” is Yarik’s counsel.

         Each supporting character has a crucial role to play. There is Toni, Billy’s love interest, who represents nobility and honor. Clyde is the bully, who represents unchecked power. Street smart and brash, he has ambitions of his own, even if those ambitions are self-defeating. “You know, the only place you can get respect is on the streets, and if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.” And adults who act alarmist over the presence of gangs, to Clyde, are hypocrites who turn to “their precious booze and pills.”

         If Toni represents the virginal, seemingly unattainable object of courtly love for Billy the squire, then it is just as believable that Billy’s wounded mother, who is left unnamed, once played the same role for his late father, a failure to her and their son. When Billy asks her “do you think Dad was anything like me when he was my age,” she replies, “No, you’re nothing like your father. You’re going to make something out of your life.” She is quite young, a sure indication that she was in her teens or early twenties when she had her son. She clings to a tremendous concern for the safety and the passage of her son into young adulthood. They just cannot communicate.

          If Yarik is successfully to advise Billy using 14^th Century values of chivalry, then he must school the squire in self-defense tactics. He shows him how to fight bareknuckle.

          Billy, while wearing Pack 13 ‘colors,’ saves the life of a young African-American boy, a member of the Snakes, pulling him up from the edge of a scaffold. Billy’s sudden heroism confuses the other Snakes, and in order to restore their feeling of stolen honor, they challenge Billy to a one-on-one fight against the rival Psycho. The match is to be held the next night at an abandoned warehouse. Though Yarik disapproves of Billy’s gang activity to begin with, the codfe of chivalry instructs him never to refuse a challenge from an equal and never to turn the back upon a foe.

           Once the task of guiding the boy is completed, Billy realizes that the only paternal figure he has left in his life—Yarik—will soon be returning to his miniature form, Billy sees Pack 13 as the only fraternal organization that cares for him. and Yarik will disappear soon. “Why do you have to go too? You taught me to do things. To be brave. To be a man,” Billy asks Yarik tearfully.

            When, near the denouement of the film, Billy and Psycho go hand-to-hand in a brutal fight, Billy ultimately recognizes the futility of the chaotic rumble that Pack 13 and Snakes have ensnared him in. Toni, having kissed Billy on the cheek for luck, knows she cannot talk him out of fighting when his “honor is at stake.” With Toni and her friends as hidden spectators and the invisible Yarik standing overhead, the two combatants have given each other a hell of a beating. Billy has Psycho pinned down and the rest of Pack 13 is egging him on to finish him off with a hockey stick. Billy suddenly withdraws, shouting “What’s the matter with you people? Am I the only one who can see how stupid this is? This isn’t a fight about honor. This isn’t a fight about respect or space.” He reveals to everyone that his father died in a street fight just like this one. “And it didn’t bring him honor. It didn’t bring him anything. I didn’t fight for my honor today. I saved it by stopping.”

          As Billy leaves the warehouse Clyde sneers, “He wasn’t part of Pack 13 anyway.” And because the fight didn’t end the way the gangs had planned, the rest of the kids stay behind and duke it out, but not before Yarik’s voice materializes in Clyde’s ear, inspiring him to exclaim:  “Anyone who wants to leave can do so right now.” Clyde is surprised to hear himself utter these words. He then qualifies himself by saying, “but anyone who wants to stay and finish this, can stay and fight right now!” The warehouse descends into chaos, but not before a few of the kids decide to heed Billy’s warning and put away their colors and walk away. “Sometimes it takes far more courage to sheathe a sword than to wield it,” Yarik tells Billy as he congratulates him.

           In the end, Billy proves himself to Toni and then he reconciles with his worried mother, and Yarik elevates Billy to the rank of knighthood. Just as the Hans Christian Andersen story ends with the tin knight and the toy ballerina enduring a final goodbye as they burn into the melting pot, in the movie Yarik disappears after Katrina the ballerina appears to take his hand in one final magical dance in the moonlight. He has reverted back into doll form. Billy next returns the tin soldier to Mr. Fallon, who offers the boy a job at his antique toy store, which Billy enthusiastically accepts. Mr. Fallon marvels at how Billy immediately knows where the knight wants to be placed. Right next to the ballerina. “He has his lady, and I have mine.” The film fades to black as Billy and Toni, hands clasped together, walk away from the store down the street, and Mr. Fallon waves farewell for now.

Comments

[S Green]

Well done Joe

[Frank Buchanan]

Good stuff.

[Matthew Moses]

Excellent article. It's the sort of complete review that I've come to expect from you, Joe. Very well done.

[Larry Denburg]

Well written!