Revisiting The Red Shoes

Moira Shearer as Vicky Page.

Black Narcissus is my favorite Michael Powell-Emeric Pressberger film--and I also think it's their masterpiece. But most critics and fans confer that "masterpiece" title on the duo's The Red Shoes (1948). I watched it many years ago, but, honestly, it didn't leave a significant impression. However, after recently viewing Made in England, an excellent documentary about Powell and Pressberger--and listening to Martin Scorsese gush about The Red Shoes' influence--I decided to give it another try.

For those who have not seen it, the plot revolves around three characters: ballet company impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), and composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Each is dedicated to the musical arts, but to varying degrees. 

Anton Walbrook as Lermontov.

Lermontov lives for his ballet company--its employees are his family. When his star ballerina joyously announces her engagement to the company, Lermontov disappears into the wings of the theater. He is already deciding who will replace her. His preference for the ballet company over the people that comprise it earns him disdain at times. One colleague refers to him as a "gifted, cruel monster."

Julian is dedicated to his music. He wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about it and rushes to the piano to transcribe it. However, Julian can balance his profession and his personal life, especially after he falls in love with Vicky.

Vicky is torn between her need to dance and her love for Julian. Like Lermontov, she is obsessed with ballet and cannot live without it. Yet, she loves Julian passionately and cannot envision a life without him. When circumstances prevent her from dancing for Lermontov's company and being with Julian, Vicky confronts an existence that's burning from both ends.

While the characters portray the conflict between art and "real life," director Michael Powell visualizes it for the audience. The centerpiece of The Red Shoes is an audacious original ballet that literally pulls the viewer from the audience into an imaginary world. Powell opens the scene showing the curtains drawing back to reveal a solitary dancer, a shoe cobbler holding red ballet slippers, on the stage. Then, he cuts to a shot of the village that crops out the framing of the stage. The viewer is now on the stage with the performers and immersed into their world. 

Vicky dancing with a newspaper man.

Over the next fifteen minutes, the ballet is presented as an almost surrealistic film, recounting Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of The Red Shoes. It's a colorful, energetic, sometimes visually frightening display of artistry, with Moira Shearer gliding past sheets of gel, floating through the air, and dancing with a man made of newspapers. The ballet ends with the protagonist's death and the shoe cobbler with the red slippers on the stage alone as the curtains draw to a close.

The controlling ballet shoes.

Powell and Pressberger merge their "real" and fantasy worlds in the climax to The Red Shoes. When Vicky appears to choose her career over love, Julian storms out of her dressing room. As Vicky walks toward the stage, her red ballet shoes seemingly take on a life of their own--forcing her to run out of the theater and toward a moving train. (It's no surprise that a train features prominently in this sequence, since Powell foreshadows its importance by integrating it into numerous scenes earlier in the film.)

Anton Walbrook is the standout among the cast. In his third Powell-Pressberger film, Walbrook gets a chance to portray a complex character that straddles the line between supportive and manipulative. Lermontov is an unforgiving taskmaster, but he recognizes artistic brilliance and supports it. When Vicky wants to leave the ballet company to be with Julian, Lermontov releases her from her contract. But when given a chance to see her again, he pressures her to come back into the fold. He wants to be gracious, but ultimately he must do what he feels is right for the ballet company.

Do I now rank The Red Shoes over Black Narcissus? No, the latter is still my favorite Powell & Pressberger film. But I am glad I watched The Red Shoes again. I have grown to admire its dazzling  colorful imagery, Powell's bold directing, and the film's exploration of the thin line between real world and the fantasy world created through visual and aural artistry.

Classic Movies About Ballet

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes.

The challenge of integrating a dynamic theatrical art form into the confines of cinema has proven to be a difficult task. Consequently, it has been undertaken almost exclusively by filmmakers/ballet lovers, whose artistic successes have been mixed equally with unmitigated failures.

British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger produced two outstanding ballet films, with Powell also contributing a third, less memorable solo effort. The first Powell-Pressburger ballet film was 1948’s The Red Shoes, which starred real-life ballerina Moira Shearer as a young dancer driven to her death by her inability to choose between ballet and a “normal” life. The highlight of this dazzling, colorful film is a 14-minute ballet of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Red Shoes,” brilliantly danced and photographed against stylized sets. The elaborate sets returned in 1951’s Tales of Hoffman, a fusion of drama, singing, and ballet based on Offenbach’s opera and featuring ballerina Shearer again. Powell turned to ballet once more, sans Pressburger, in 1959’s all-but-forgotten Honeymoon, which featured excerpts from the Spanish ballets “Los Amantes de Teruel” and “El Amor Brujo.”

Leslie Caron & Gene Kelly in
An American in Paris.

The most interesting pre-Red Shoes ballet picture was The Specter of the Rose (1946), an offbeat drama about a young dancer who is slowly losing his mind. It featured a rare screen appearance by drama teacher Michael Chekhov and the potent presence of Dame Judith Anderson. Gene Kelly, after choreographing a modern ballet for a set-piece in An American in Paris (1951), incorporated ballet into his all-dance 1957 picture Invitation to the Dance. Shot in 1952, this three-part anthology boasted energetic dancing and clever direction (including a combination of live action and cartoon), but it crashed at the boxoffice and almost ended Kelly’s career. In contrast, Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point (1977) was a solid popular and critical favorite. Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft had the starring roles as a pair of former ballerinas, but Mikhail Baryshnikov stole the film every time he took to the dance floor.

Ballets filmed in their entirety have been rare, but have nevertheless been captured in Peter Rabbit and the Tales of Beatrix Potter (1971), Nutcracker (1982), and Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986).

Margaret O'Brien in
The Unfinished Dance.

There have been numerous films, not expressly about ballet, which have featured ballerinas as principal characters. The role call of actresses who have played ballerinas is a varied one: Greta Garbo (Grand Hotel); Maureen O’Hara (Dance, Girl, Dance); Vivien Leigh (Waterloo Bridge); Loretta Young (The Men in Her Life); Margaret O’Brien (The Unfinished Dance); Janet Leigh (The Red Danube); Gene Tierney (Never Let Me Go); and Leslie Caron (Gaby).  (I think it's too early include the stars of The Black Swan....it's not a classic yet).

Ballet segments have highlighted many mainstream musicals, though the sequences in An American in Paris, Oklahoma!, and On Your Toes stand out. Films about ballet, or featuring notable scenes, include:

Grand Hotel (1932)
On Your Toes (1939)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
Waterloo Bridge (1940)
The Men in Her Life (1941)
The Dancing Masters (1943)
Specter of the Rose (1946)
Carnival (1946)
The Unfinished Dance (1947)
The Imperfect Lady (1947)
The Red Shoes (1948)
The Red Danube (1949)
Illicit Interlude (aka Summer Play; Summer Interlude) (1950)
An American in Paris (1951)
Tales of Hoffman (1951)
Limelight (1952)
Never Let Me Go (1953)
Dance Little Lady (1955)
Oklahoma! (1955)
Gaby (1956)
Meet Me in Las Vegas (aka Viva Las Vegas) (1956)
Invitation to the Dance (1957)
Angel in a Taxi (1959)
Honeymoon (1959)
Vampire and the Ballerina (1962)
Peter Rabbit and the Tales of Beatrix Potter (aka The Tales of Beatrix Potter) (1971)
The Turning Point (1977)
Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978)
The Cowboy and the Ballerina (1984 TVM)
Nutcracker (1982)
Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986)
Dancers (1987)
Dancing for Mr. B: Six Balanchine Ballerinas (1989)

On Your Toes

I don’t like baseball, but I love movies about baseball. You see all the good parts without the long, boring stretches. The same may be true for many people regarding ballet. Even if you would not spend an evening at the ballet, there are three movies about ballet that I believe are movie-making at its best.

The Red Shoes (1948) is probably the most famous of ballet-themed movies. Starring prima ballerina Moira Shearer, it is a story of conflict, love and tragedy. The Hans Christian Anderson tale about a girl who covets a pair of red shoes, only to find that they will never stop dancing, is mirrored in the story of ballerina Vicky Page (Shearer). Her love of dance and fascination with Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), the ballet impresario who is a thinly disguised version of real-life ballet producer Diaghilev, collides with her wish for normal love and life with composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). This conflict is portrayed on a melodramatic and epic scale.

This film is rich in color, incredible music by Brian Easdale, and the genius of writer-producer-directors Powell and Pressburger (also famous for their film Black Narcissus). The Ballet of the Red Shoes, starring and choreographed by ballet master Robert Helpmann is a marvel of impressionistic artistry. The great Leonide Massine created the role of the demonic shoemaker. Both give performances that rival the sinister Walbrook, the emotive Goring and the ethereal Shearer.

In 1977, director Herbert Ross filmed The Turning Point, starring Anne Bancroft, Shirley Maclaine, the great Mikhail Baryshnikov and young ballerina Leslie Browne. Alternating between the often idealized world of ballet and the everyday world of marriage and family, the film revolves around the relationship between aging prima ballerina Emma (Bancroft) and former ballerina turned wife and mother Deedee (Maclaine). The complex relationship between the two women see-saws from love to anger, from jealousy to need. Their turmoil comes to a head in a fight you will not soon forget. Meanwhile, Baryshnikov and Browne strike up their own star-crossed love affair. Basically a study of people and relationships, the film is filled with incredible dancing to some of ballet’s most famous and beautiful scores. In all respects, The Turning Point is a tour de force.

Herbert Ross turned to ballet again with 1980’s Nijinsky. George de la Pena plays and dances the doomed Vaslav Nijinsky, premiere dancer of the Ballet Russe in the early 20th Century. Alan Bates is wonderfully effete as Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballet Russe and Nijinsky’s lover. Leslie Browne appears again as a naïve lovestruck girl who eventually marries Nijinsky. This marriage causes an irreparable rift between Diaghilev and Nijinsky, ending Nijinsky’s career with the Ballet Russe. De la Pena dances three of Nijinsky’s most famous performances, Spectre de la Rose, Scheherazade and Afternoon of a Faun, all presented with splendid artistry and authenticity. It is with Afternoon of a Faun that Nijinsky performs an indecent act on stage, and his eventual descent into madness begins. Although not an actor per se, de la Pena does an admirable job bringing to disturbing life the hysterical nature of Nijinsky, as well as his downward spiral at a very young age into the semi-comatose state in which he spent the remainder of his life.

So, if you don’t like baseball but enjoy baseball movies, take a chance on these three wonderful films. You will never forget them.