Figure 1.-- There are several musical numbers in "Marry Andrew" to go along with Kaye's slap-stick antics. Kaye and the boys have a dance scene in their form room. The image here shows part of the dance scene in the form room. You can tell Americans produced the film. British prep schools are fine schools, but a weakness at most of the schools was the libraries. Few classrooms had collections of books like this and most had very small libraries.

There are several musical numbers in "Marry Andrew" to go along with Kaye's slap-stick antics. Kaye and the boys have a dance scene in their form room. The image here shows the dance scene in the form room (figure 1). I thought he was pretending to be the Pied Piper of Hamlin. The image is black and white, but the movie is a color. A reader tells us that this is the Pam dance scene from Merry Andrew. Andrew was apparently singing about the Greek god Pan. Pan was the Roman Faunus. He was part goat and the son of Hermes. He made music on a double recorder, the origin of the term Pan flute. Pan was the god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, as well as the companion of the nymphs. The school the film is set in was a stogy private school. But Pan apparently enters in as the classics, including mythology, was given great attention. Latin was always taught, although only the best students took Greek. As one of the songs is "Pipes of Pan", the dance scene is surely the Pan Dance as our reader suggests. The scene occurs at the beginning of the film. Johnny Mercer wrote the song and Nelson Riddle did the orchestration. Its a really funny scene. The boys are quite well behaved and take part in the dance properly. so its quite interesting from motivating children to learn the classics. The Danny Kaye character, however, gets into trouble. He is accused by his headmaster father of allowing his class to get out of hand and not maintaining discipline. There is a flaw in the continuity. We see an outside view of children dancing around the classroom but the next shot shows the inside of the classroom and . all the boys are seated and singling along to Danny Kaye's song!

Created: 10:00 PM 11/29/2010
Last updated: 4:19 AM 11/30/2010