The Red Shoes

`Why do you want to dance?' Anton Walbrook asks of Moira Shearer part way through Powell and Pressburger's inventive ballet film. `Why do you want to live?' is her cool response. Suggested by the Hans Christian Andersen story and a project long in development by P&P, this sumptuous colour production allows Shearer to display her excellent ballet skills alongside Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine, and all three are excellent.

In fact, the `Red Shoes Ballet' alone is enough to recommend this movie in the strongest terms. Also in the cast is P&P regular Marius Goring, as the composer pushed aside for the lure of the stage. Walbrook, as the emotionless impresario who is only alive within the confines of his art, is superb, and perhaps only his role as Theo in `Colonel Blimp' served him better.

I guess the lesson to be learned is that when one is in the arts and striving to be the best it demands 100% of you. At least that's the lesson I took away from The Red Shoes. The film itself is a reworking of the plot from Maytime with dance instead of singing as the art form.

Moira Shearer plays aspiring ballerina Victoria Page and her talent is immediately recognized by ballet impresario Anton Walbrook. He takes her under his wing, but Walbrook seems to want to control every aspect of her life. Walbrook also gives a break to young composer Marius Goring whom he hires to help orchestrate the music that the dancer's use. Goring is talented but also quite full of himself as well. Soon enough Shearer and Goring fall in love and that does not fit into the long range plans Walbrook has.

The title comes from a story by Hans Christian Andersen about a ballerina who sees a pair of red ballet slippers and puts them on and she can dance better than anyone has before. But The Red Shoes have their own enchantment, you can't stop dancing once they're on. The ballerina arranges for her feet to be cut off to stop dancing.

The ballet is an allegory for the terrible price one of these three has to pay for art's sake. The ballet itself which we see in its entirety is maybe the best ballet sequence ever brought to the big screen. Pieces of other classic ballet numbers are also scattered throughout the film and are woven and completely integrated into the plot.

Though John Barrymore who was the manager and husband of Jeanette Macdonald in Maytime was no longer available, Anton Walbrook got his career role out of playing Boris Lermontov who constantly walks back and forth over the line between dedication and obsession. Marius Goring is far from Nelson Eddy in this, he's ambitious and wants it all wife and career. To the extent that Shearer is also in the arts, he wants her in no small part to support his ambitions. In fact he becomes as unlikeable as Walbrook. Torn between these two men it is no wonder Shearer meets the fate she does.

Wonderful ballet sequences splendidly photographed by Jack Cardiff and well tuned acting performances by the three leads are the hallmark of The Red Shoes. This one is a timeless classic.

I am biased because I have loved this film ever since I was four years old. Some films, as you grow and age, lose their magic and you forget what made you love it as a child. This film has only strengthened my love and appreciation of it as I have grown older. I am not one to narrate a storyline, as this film is great for more than, and even despite, it's story.

The beautiful colour photography of the locations, including London, Paris and Monte Carlo, will take you back to a fictional glamorous 1940's where everyone wore chic clothes and were perfectly mannered and groomed and make you wish you could visit there sometime.

The music is a highlight for me. Brian Easdale has written such a detailed and nuanced lyrical score that does not overpower any moment in the film. There are moments where the music so perfectly conveys a character's very thought, even though they are not saying a word and their face betrays not a hint of emotion.

The story is a familiar one, particularly today, of ambition and the balance between career and personal life, between a creative passion and a human one. And of course, yes there is the ballet element. I have no interest in ballet and I love the film. It does play up the prima ballerinas and haughty choreographer stereotypes, but as they are played by real ballet dancers, I think it makes it all the funnier. Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine are particularly hilarious and over the top, so full of pathos and themselves.

Anton Walbrook is the star of this film, playing a Diaghilev type character and absolutely dominates any scene he is in. He is not bombastic in a showy, hammy way. It is a more silent but deadly charismatic performance. It is a pity he did not receive an award for it. He is stern, uncompromising, cold and passionate and absolutely deadly. He is a gentleman tough guy.

Moira Shearer and Marius Goring, unfortunately do not fare so well in comparison, but they are perfectly adequate in their roles and have some touching and funny moments. It is not altogether their fault, the characters are a little bland, especially in comparison to all the other larger than life characters they are paired with. Shearer really comes good as soon as she starts dancing.

Which brings me to the fifteen minute ballet in the middle of the film. It is beautiful (and brief). The dancing is fabulous, it looks beautiful and the music is amazing. No one should fast forward this masterpiece of filmed ballet. It is cinematic, not (as filmed ballet usually is) procenium stage bound. It is a modern ballet, choreographed by Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine and is a story, perhaps even a mirror, within and of the film.

The Red Shoes combines every one of it's elements into a perfect whole. Some elements are a bit lacking, the story is very simple and given another context a bit soap opera like, but combined with the visuals, the music, the characters and the human comedy-tragedy, it is a beautiful complete film and one that will keep improving with age.

10/10

Art as vocation; art as religion; art as the purpose of life: The Archers team of Powell and Pressburger aimed high with 'The Red Shoes' - and scored a bull's-eye. The film is a feast for the senses: cinematography (by Archers regular Jack Cardiff), music, acting and ballet are combined to make a magnificent whole. Emeric Pressburger's story appears simple at first glance, but is a challenging study of the value and purpose of art, and of aestheticism as a creed (a term not used lightly). It is given life by some of the most talented dancers of the era: Leonid Myasin/Massine as lovable Grisha; Ludmilla Tchérina as glamorous, flighty Irina; Robert Helpmann - who choreographed the title ballet - as Ivan; Marie Rambert as herself, and Moira Shearer (Ashton's 'Cinderella') highly appealing as the heroine Vicky. The non-dancing cast is led by Archers regulars Anton Walbrook (magnificent - why no Oscar?) and Marius Goring (so convincing I ended up wanting to slap him).

The plot combines Andersen's fable, 'The Red Shoes' with elements of Dyagilev's relationships with Nizhinskii and Myasin, and the effect of the younger men's marriages. Dancer Vicky Page (Shearer) and composer Julian Craster (Goring) are taken up and encouraged by ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Walbrook).

Boris is the film's dominant character, an obvious portrait of Sergei Pavlovich Dyagilev (1872-1929), one of 20C culture's greatest figures, the driving force of 'Mir Iskusstva' and the 'Ballets Russes'. However, his Scots-Russian surname alludes to Mikhail Yur'evich Lermontov (1814-41), poet and author of 'A Hero of Our Time', Pushkin's successor as the voice of Russian Romanticism. Boris is an aesthete and perfectionist, a true believer in the religion of art. All his passions and energies are channelled into bringing out the best in the company that is his 'family'. He demands equal dedication from his protégés. He believes that if you have an outstanding talent, your primary duty is to give that talent its fullest expression, not fritter it away through mundane distractions and dalliances. Human relationships are transitory: what matters is the art. It is a stern, unsentimental creed, but a noble one.

Vicky and Julian begin an affair during the creation of the new ballet, 'The Red Shoes' (which we see in full, and has, in its sacrificial death-by-dancing, echoes of Stravinskii's 'Sacre du Printemps', choreographed by Nizhinskii for Dyagilev). Their love tests their commitment to Lermontov's ethic. What makes the conflict interesting and effective is that it is not trivialised as sexual rivalry: Boris is discreetly signalled as gay, like Dyagilev - something reinforced by the casting of Walbrook. (It is unnecessary to highlight the courage, in 1948, of placing centre-stage a dignified, powerful, non-caricatured gay character, played by a gay actor who had escaped Nazi persecution.) The struggle is between real Romanticism - hence Boris's sharing his name with the Byronic poet - and mere 'romance'. But the brutal climax, bringing together Andersen's story with suitably Russian overtones of 'Anna Karenina', is an evasion of decision: a character choosing death rather than commitment one way or the other. The final scene combines tragic lyricism with awareness of the unnecessary waste: and the dance, of course, goes on.

My understanding of and relationship with 'The Red Shoes' has changed and deepened with time. In girlhood, I was inclined to be relatively indulgent to Vicky and Julian. In middle age, they seem plain self-indulgent. Julian, frankly, isn't worth any sacrifice. Ballet is a "second-rate form of expression", he says in a quarrel with Boris - who, of course, launched his career. (If Boris had punched *him* instead of the mirror, how I'd have cheered!) He regards Vicky as a muse for his own fulfilment as a composer, while she frets with frustration, her pointe shoes in a drawer, her own artistic fulfilment denied. Their separate beds after marriage seem a revealing insight, not merely '40s film censorship. On the spectrum of fictional obnoxiousness, Julian's not far behind Angel Clare in 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles'. Boris's manipulations are actually *less* selfish - directed towards enabling Vicky to express *her* creativity to the maximum - not bury her talent in a drawer.

Yes - Boris's passionately held vocation and values now evoke my strongest sympathies and recognition/identification as a fellow 'true believer' in art (and long-time Dyagilev-ite). Young sentimentalists may hate him (he knows "adolescent nonsense" when he hears it!), but he speaks hard truths and much wisdom. Personal relationships are fragile; a dancer's active career can be short. If you have a gift, service to it must come first: it is a sacred duty. Domesticity can wait. Yes, he is autocratic, temperamental: prophets and visionaries usually are. And what is his job? To unite other exceptionally gifted people from diverse disciplines - painting, costume, music, dance - with *their* competing egos and artistic temperaments, to create the multifaceted art of ballet. Herding cats is easier! And yet he is capable of generosity and forgiveness, as with the prodigal Irina. A complex, moving, genuinely heroic figure, 'The Red Shoes' is more his film than Vicky and Julian's.

But what went wrong with British film? The Archers made 'The Red Shoes' in 1948; now we have vacuous romantic-comedy/chick-flick pap or drab kitchen-sinkers that might as well be TV soap episodes, betokening a loss of cultural and intellectual confidence. (In visual flair, has The Archers' torch passed to Baz Luhrmann? Time will tell!) The present cultural climate treats the arts as an optional add-on to civilisation, rather than a defining part of what it means to be civilised. The arts are constantly called upon to justify their existence in commercial or social engineering terms, not for their intrinsic worth. A film, then, in which the most compelling character advocates Art for Art's Sake - art as a sacred calling - flings a gauntlet in the face of a market-driven, anti-intellectual, anti-beauty, utilitarian society. Sergei Pavlovich/Boris Lermontov, where are you now we need you?!!!

The resourceful approach that characterizes so many of the Michael Powell/ Emeric Pressburger collaborations makes "The Red Shoes" one of the most creative and interesting of any of the "back stage" movies that show the lives and dreams of creative artists at work. The characters are quite interesting in themselves, and the story brings out some worthwhile aspects of each of their natures while giving a realistic and often fascinating look at their world.

By no means do you have to be a ballet fan to appreciate and enjoy the story or the settings. While fully convincing in themselves, they are also set up so that the most important aspects and conflicts of the plot could easily be applied to those working in other creative fields as well.

Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, and Marius Goring make a nicely balanced and intriguing trio of main characters. The opening scenes work very well in bringing them together while being enjoyable to watch in themselves. From there, the creative tensions are built up steadily as the story itself becomes even more interesting. The script makes use of the best conventions of its genre, while never allowing itself to become formulaic.

There is also a good deal of creativity in many of the individual sequences. The opening scene at the opera is particularly clever in playing off of a viewer's initial expectations. The most spectacular sequence is the "red shoes" ballet segment itself, a very imaginative and enjoyable mini-movie that also parallels some of the main story's most interesting ideas. All in all, "The Red Shoes" well deserves its reputation as a distinctive classic.