The team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger direct and write one of the great ballet melodramas of all time. Hans Christian Andersen's tragic fairy tale serves as the outline for a film about a backstage love story. The film's core relationship between the impresario and dancer was a take on the one between Diaghilev and Nijinsky. It's the kind of dance film that can appeal to a wide audience not just balletomane devotees.
Originally, Emeric Pressburger's story was commissioned by producer Alexander Korda for his wife-star Merle Oberon (Oscar nominated for "Wuthering Heights" in 1939). One problem was Oberon could not dance. Pressburger then bought the story back and decided to co-direct it with partner Michael Powell with Moira Shearer, a pro dancer who could also act, in the lead. Red-haired Shearer was then a ballerina at Sadler's Wells. In the film, she is joined by such skillful dancers as Léonide Massine, Ludmilla Tchérina, and Robert Helpmann, who also worked on the choreography.
It begins when a talented but impoverished musical composer Julian Craster (Goring) attends a London performance of the Lermontov Ballet Company and recognizes his own score being performed without his authorization. Complaining to ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Walbrook - who gives the films best performance), things get resolved when the composer is hired to compose the score for his next work -- a ballet version of "The Red Shoes." It's based on Hans Christian Anderson's story about a pair of magical shoes that permit their wearer to magically dance without ever stopping. The impresario also hires a gifted sweet young flaming red-haired dancer, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer, the Sadler's Wells ballerina's debut as an actress), to perform in the ballet.
The centerpiece of the film is a stunning 20 minute ballet sequence, where we see The Red Shoes performed, first on traditional stages, but then on increasingly expressionistic and fanciful sets, until it's clear that the brilliant dance and music have taken the performance away from anything approaching reality, onto a plane of pure art, where such things as the laws of physics and time and space don't seem to apply. It's a heartbreaking and wonderful experience. Leonide Massine, who plays the choreographer and who created the unforgettable character of the Shoemaker within the ballet, is considered to be one of the greatest choreographers in the Western World, creating over 50 ballets. It is he, not Moira Shearer, who makes the ballet sequence so entrancing (and I can't say that I traditionally like ballet). You just can't take your eyes off him. Not bad for someone that his mentor, Sergei Diaghilev, called nothing but a good-looking face and poor legs.
As a result, the ballet is well received and Julian and Victoria fall madly in love. Meanwhile Boris recognizes how talented Victoria is and puts all his energy into making her the perfect dancer and a slave to her art, as The Red Shoes is set to go on tour throughout Europe. Things get dicey when Julian leaves the company and Victoria marries him over the objections of the overbearing and jealous Svengali-like Boris, who believes her art comes before love. Boris uses his power to prevent her from dancing the role that brought her fame. After the music stops the film comes down from its lofty heights to tell its mundane story. The dancer misses performing her magical role and after meeting the impresario by accident after a long time not seeing him agrees to dance for him again just one more time, thus missing her possessive hubby's premiere of his new work. There's a hidden "gayness" to all these melodramatic moves as the three protagonists in the concluding scene in Monaco confront one another and each makes an earnest case for how they stand. It leads to a tragic ending for the dancer who is torn between love and her world of dancing.
The Red Shoes is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking films one could ever see, certainly one of the best uses of Technicolor cinematography (if not the best) in the history of film. It's one of the best looks at the tensions that tear at artists who want to devote their lives to their art but find themselves entangled in the affairs of humanity. It's also a very good portrait of the difficulties a woman in the 1950s had deciding between her career and her so-called womanly duties as a wife and mother. Directing/producing/writing team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger did not--could not--make a bad film in the whole decade of the 1940's or the years bookending it, but with The Red Shoes they created one of the screen's great tragedies.
Originally, Emeric Pressburger's story was commissioned by producer Alexander Korda for his wife-star Merle Oberon (Oscar nominated for "Wuthering Heights" in 1939). One problem was Oberon could not dance. Pressburger then bought the story back and decided to co-direct it with partner Michael Powell with Moira Shearer, a pro dancer who could also act, in the lead. Red-haired Shearer was then a ballerina at Sadler's Wells. In the film, she is joined by such skillful dancers as Léonide Massine, Ludmilla Tchérina, and Robert Helpmann, who also worked on the choreography.
It begins when a talented but impoverished musical composer Julian Craster (Goring) attends a London performance of the Lermontov Ballet Company and recognizes his own score being performed without his authorization. Complaining to ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Walbrook - who gives the films best performance), things get resolved when the composer is hired to compose the score for his next work -- a ballet version of "The Red Shoes." It's based on Hans Christian Anderson's story about a pair of magical shoes that permit their wearer to magically dance without ever stopping. The impresario also hires a gifted sweet young flaming red-haired dancer, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer, the Sadler's Wells ballerina's debut as an actress), to perform in the ballet.
The centerpiece of the film is a stunning 20 minute ballet sequence, where we see The Red Shoes performed, first on traditional stages, but then on increasingly expressionistic and fanciful sets, until it's clear that the brilliant dance and music have taken the performance away from anything approaching reality, onto a plane of pure art, where such things as the laws of physics and time and space don't seem to apply. It's a heartbreaking and wonderful experience. Leonide Massine, who plays the choreographer and who created the unforgettable character of the Shoemaker within the ballet, is considered to be one of the greatest choreographers in the Western World, creating over 50 ballets. It is he, not Moira Shearer, who makes the ballet sequence so entrancing (and I can't say that I traditionally like ballet). You just can't take your eyes off him. Not bad for someone that his mentor, Sergei Diaghilev, called nothing but a good-looking face and poor legs.
As a result, the ballet is well received and Julian and Victoria fall madly in love. Meanwhile Boris recognizes how talented Victoria is and puts all his energy into making her the perfect dancer and a slave to her art, as The Red Shoes is set to go on tour throughout Europe. Things get dicey when Julian leaves the company and Victoria marries him over the objections of the overbearing and jealous Svengali-like Boris, who believes her art comes before love. Boris uses his power to prevent her from dancing the role that brought her fame. After the music stops the film comes down from its lofty heights to tell its mundane story. The dancer misses performing her magical role and after meeting the impresario by accident after a long time not seeing him agrees to dance for him again just one more time, thus missing her possessive hubby's premiere of his new work. There's a hidden "gayness" to all these melodramatic moves as the three protagonists in the concluding scene in Monaco confront one another and each makes an earnest case for how they stand. It leads to a tragic ending for the dancer who is torn between love and her world of dancing.
The Red Shoes is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking films one could ever see, certainly one of the best uses of Technicolor cinematography (if not the best) in the history of film. It's one of the best looks at the tensions that tear at artists who want to devote their lives to their art but find themselves entangled in the affairs of humanity. It's also a very good portrait of the difficulties a woman in the 1950s had deciding between her career and her so-called womanly duties as a wife and mother. Directing/producing/writing team Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger did not--could not--make a bad film in the whole decade of the 1940's or the years bookending it, but with The Red Shoes they created one of the screen's great tragedies.