THE RED SHOES (1948)
I recently had the honor of attending a screening of the newly restored masterpiece The Red Shoes, written, directed and produced by the creative team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, also known as The Archers. This team also wrote and produced Black Narcissus and the notorious Peeping Tom, and are recognized as one of the most artistically gifted teams in film history. The Red Shoes, like many now revered works, received a rather tepid critical reception when it was first released but has become canonical for several reasons: it's often cited as the best movie about ballet as well as it's genius technicolor cinematography by Jack Cardiff. But everything about the film is breathtaking, from beginning to end.
As a balletomane (that's ballet + mania) the film has special meaning for me. As an amateur art historian the film has meaning for me, as well. Narratively it's about the genius impresario, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) who brings together the best dancers, composers and artists for his Monte Carlo based ballet company. Inevitably his obsessive focus lands on the ballerina, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) who he seeks to control in order to make her "a great dancer." When she falls in love and later marries with the new company composer (Marius Goring), well all hell breaks loose.
Because the story of the maniacal artistic genius and the muse they try to control/destroy is so familiar in reality and fiction, there are many interpretations as to who the film is referring to. The screenplay was first written in the 1930s so for many reasons there is no doubt that the model for Lermontov must be Diaghilev and his Ballet Russes, which later became the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. At the screening I attended, full of Hollywood types, one director attempted to claim kinship to Lermontov/Diaghilev as if putting together a cast and crew were on par with bringing together the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Vaslav Nijinksy and George Balanchine. Even Alfred Hitchcock, who fits the mold of monomaniacal and muse obsessed genius, probably would not have made such a comparison.
On the other hand it is a fantastical, melodramatic look into a fantastical and melodramatic world. As balletomanes who used to be dancers know, dance is an obsession, it has to be if one wants to be even moderately successful. All you need do is take a peek at Dancing With the Stars to see a comparison of years of commitment to the art with a few weeks of workout. And the best popular dance films are a perfect combination of over the top narrative and serious reverence for dance as presented in actual performances as in Singin' in the Rain, Oklahoma!, West Side Story and even the ballet all-stars event, The Turning Point.
But The Red Shoes is a film that resides on that tricky border between highbrow and middlebrow culture. From a purely historical perspective it opens the door on dance history, if you in anyway understand what you are watching. As referenced above Lermontov equals Diaghilev (Balanchine despised story ballets, prima ballerinas, and original scores), and Leonid Massine is the direct link. He was the next great Russian dancer to spring from that company after Nijinksy's departure. Robert Helpmann who plays the male lead, was himself, at the time, a principal dancer with Sadler Wells now The Royal Ballet. Moirer Shearer was also a young principal with hat company and went on to have a long ballet career. There are scenes that show the collaboration between the production designer, composer and impresario that echoes the creative process of Diaghilev, as well as other well known heads of dance companies. But Diaghilev was a singularly dapper and charming aesthete, multi-lingual, old world and dare we say it, gay. Of course, no one is outed in the film but there are more than a few coded scenes that suggest this, such as one showing Lermontov in a positively luscious dressing gown and slippers.
The Red Shoes is also the ballet film against which all others are measured because of it's presentation of dance. Instead of dance numbers, the performances are an integral part of the narrative, yet we ballet fanatics get snippets of the classics such as highlights of Swan Lake, Giselle, Les Sylphides (first performed at the Ballet Russes as Chopiniana), Coppelia and others. The center-piece is the ballet of The Red Shoes, a 14 minute homage to both the Hans Christian Andersen child horror tale (in the story the girl cuts off her feet to get rid of the every dancing shoes) and a certain type of story ballet style, popular with certain companies at the time. The ballet itself, as dance, is somewhat dated, but Shearer's is magnificent. The set design and the cinematography, though, are exquisite.
So ultimately although this is the film that inspired young girls to take up ballet by the boatloads, and whose imprint can be seen in so many dance films that follow like An American in Paris, it is more about the magic of film. I still have not, and do not believe I will ever see a film with the kind of vivid colors that both seem real and unreal at the same time. There is the sparkling blue Mediterranean set against the sunlit sky in the Monte Carlo scenes. There is the bright, yet Dickensian bustle of the streets surrounding Covent Garden. There is even the vividly grey rainy day inside and outside the Mercury theater. It's the costumes (on the big screen I saw a closeup of a particularly luscious looking alligator handbag) and the sets. Every visual detail was deliberately placed as if on a canvas.
Whenever people bemoan the death of cinema, the actual theatrical experience I have to say nonsense. And I'm someone who watches television on my computer. But then again, it's the small screen, that is what TV is, the why it's shot the way it is. There is absolutely nothing so satisfying, so exquisite as seeing an gorgeous old masterpiece that looks fantastic on TV, in the place it was intended. The Red Shoes is more than worth paying to see in all of it's big screen, theatrical splendor.
Look for the newly restored THE RED SHOES, (hopefully) coming to a theater near you.
