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Two different kinds of stories can be derived from “The Red Shoes.” Those stories create a balance that may be unique for any movie made about ballet. One story could be A Haliwood musical, a ballerina becomes an overnight star when she falls in love with the composer of the ballet, she is featured in. The other story is more sinister and cautious. It encompasses the head of the ballet company, an absolute dictator, who expects submission and who gets infuriated at the marriage of the young people. The reasons for the marriage of the ballerina and her lover lie on the surface. Yet, the relationship between the lover with her dance teacher remains shrouded. From his dark eyes, we read resentment and anger. It is not jealousy, at least not romantic jealousy. It’s not that uncomplicated.
Passionately, the film expresses love through storytelling with voluptuous beauty. The viewing experience feels like immersion and pampering. The ending is shocking and unpredictable but the audience immediately knows it is a fantasy and then plays it as reality. It is a Hans Christian Andersen fable of a little girl who wears a pair of flashing red slippers that will force her to stop dancing. She has to dance, and dance, in an exaggerated mockery of glee, until she dies. That is, you would agree, is a terrible topic for a ballet, and the movie context it with the cut-throat business of operating a ballet company.
The film “The Red Shoes” premiered in 1948, when Britain was famous for Powell and Emeric Pressburger, as much as they revered Hitchcock, Read, or Lean. Powell was responsible for directing the film and Pressburger, the Hungarian immigrant, wrote the screenplay. They were known as “The Archers,” highlighted by their logo that depicted an arrow hitting a target. Some of their most famous films include “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” “Black Narcissus,” “Peeping Tom,” and “A Matter of Life and Death,” the last of which is known in America as “Stairway to Heaven.”
In the 1930s, Pressburger wrote a draft of a ballet film and after achieving major success with “Black Narcissus” in 1947, which won Oscars for cinematography and art direction, with Deborah Kerr as a star of the film, they decided to revisit it. Powell grew up on the French Rivier, with a British father who owned a hotel on Cap Ferrat. He often used to watch the Russian impresario Diaghilev whose Ballets Russes wintered near Monte Carlo.
The Archers are said to have used Powell’s ideas of Diaghilev along with the script and created a story that focuses on an impressive, nigh flamboyant entrepreneur who is matched against a fierce ballerina. It’s possible Pressburger derived inspiration from a well-known incident in 1913 when Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaghilev’s highly talented yet troubled star, wed the Romanian ballerina Romola de Pulszky. He subsequently sacked them both.
When a character has to transition from the real world to the fantasy world, casting becomes important. Without Moira Shearer and Anton Walbrook, “The Red Shoes” would have been a failure. Shearer and Walbrook are both eccentric and have brought emotive realism to the characters they played, who in essence are mere stereotypes. Walbrook plays Boris Lermontov, the rigid ruler of the Ballet Lermontov whose iron hand governs everything. He embodies arrogance and unbending coolness who can charm or scare with equal ease. Shearer plays the dancer Victoria Page whose friend Julian Craster (Marius Goring) storms into Lermontov’s office complaining about a theft by the company’s conductor. Lermontov hires Julian who employs Vicky after she wins an audition and when the leading lady dancer decides to get married, they are all told, “We have three weeks to create a ballet out of nothing.” and proceeds to get married.
Moira Shearer, let it be said, is the greatest beauty of all time “She had a magnificent body. Her cloud of red hair, as natural and beautiful as any animal’s, flamed and glittered like an autumn bonfire” claimed Powell in the best autobiography of a cinematographer.
“She wasn’t slender, rather, she lacked any excess body fat.” About Walbrook, he stated “Anton has a soft heart that he conceals behind perfect manners that serve as a shield. To him, clothing is like a chameleon that sympathizes with its environment, changing shape and color.”
Which is correct. Walbrook portrays a German aristocrat sympathetically in “Colonel Blimp.” In Max Ophuls’s great film “La Ronde” (1950), he is our charming and sophisticated guide to a decadent society. In “The Red Shoes,” he creates an enigma on purpose, a man who appears unable to be understood by others and who chooses to impose his will without revealing his emotions.
Vicky Page is the opposite She is life-loving and vivacious. Shearer was 21 and part of the Sadler’s Wells Company when she was selected for the role. She was also dancing in the wings of the young Margot Fonteyn. She didn’t consider films very significant, and so did not accept the role in “The Red Shoes” for a year. She eventually returned to ballet and perhaps never realized how brilliantly she performed in the movie and how deeply she connected with the camera. “I never knew what a natural was before,” said Powell to studio owner J. Arthur Rank. “But now I do. It’s Moira Shearer.”
The film tells two simultaneous stories, which lead to a 17-minute ballet performance. While Vicky and Julian are falling in love, Lermontov and his company are creating the new ballet. One of the important moments is when Lermontov and all his colleagues are gathered in his villa for Julian’s first performance of the new ballet. “I was determined to shoot it in one big master shot,” Powell wrote, and it is a masterpiece of composition, entrances, and exits, approaches to the camera, background action, and the strong feeling of a working creative group.
He wrote, “There are a lot of clever scenes from ‘The Red Shoes,’ but this is the picture’s heart.”
Another important moment of the picture is the ballet itself and the sequence leading up to the ending. “The Red Shoes” was the first motion picture to feature an extended ballet within the storyline, and its success established that practice in other films like “An American in Paris” and “Singin’ In The Rain.” However, none of those movies had a more stunning imagination than “The Red Shoes” when the little shoemaker dresses the girl with the deathly slippers. The real stage metamorphoses into an ethereal dimension, where Shearer floats, soars, glides through fictive worlds and even does a pas de deux with a dancing newspaper that transforms into a dancer only to morph back into a newspaper. The dancer’s costume was crafted from the newspaper, and by banking the top of their jumps, Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer, changed the camera’s speed at the points where the slower the camera the higher the jump. The scene almost single-handedly won an Oscar for Art Direction, but there were also Oscars for music, and motto nominations for best picture, editing, and screenplay.
After Vicky and Julian are married, and Lermontov fires them, he convinces her to dance “The Red Shoes” one final time. Julian flies to Monte Carlo from London, missing the premiere of his new symphony, to confront Vicky for, in his words, ‘abandoning him’. Who does she choose? The dance, or her husband? In a stunning close-up, the red slippers make her turn and seem to lead her as she runs from the theater towards a train and throws herself into its path. While commenting on the script, Pressburger argued that Vicky could not have been wearing the red slippers while running away because it was before the ballet had begun. Powell writes, “I was a director, a storyteller, and I knew that she must. I didn’t try to explain it. I just did it.”
What underlies Lermontov’s animosity towards the marriage of the two youths? Is it revenge for unrequited love? Does he want Vicky, or Julian for that matter? He is a bachelor with a gay 1940s style complete with a well-selected wardrobe and a detached way of living. Even so, he never does anything that reveals sexual feelings. He would prefer death to display vulnerability. My theory is that Lermontov is Mephistopheles. His side of the bargain with Vicky is, “I will make you the greatest dancer the world has ever known.” He however warns her, “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer.” The classical demon is furious when, after claiming the world’s greatest dancer, he loses her soul to another. He will above all, be disobeyed.
This enables us to understand Vicky’s final decision. She can go back to London and Julian, or leave him and resume her career. What drives her to eliminate these possibilities at the height of her career and youth to her death? The solution, as is obvious, is that she is powerless once the red shoes go on.
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