Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1948)
The Technicolor and the exotic settings – Paris, Monte Carlo – must have entranced audiences in post-war austerity Britain (although the film was a bigger commercial hit in New York). As in Powell and Pressburger’s preceding picture, Black Narcissus (1947), the visual imagination at work here is awesome but The Red Shoes is very differently esteemed. Black Narcissus, peopled mainly by sex-starved-and-hungry nuns, is widely regarded as brilliantly expressionist kitsch. The Red Shoes is not only a ballet film but also features, in the cast, in the dancing and on the choreography credits, real great names of the ballet world – Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine. (Marie Rambert makes a cameo appearance.) In other words, it has authentic artistry in front of the camera, as well as behind it – part of why The Red Shoes is considered by plenty of cinéastes a great film. (As of last month, it achieved a place in Sight & Sound’s top-100 poll of critics et al and hence a place in the current BFI programme celebrating all the entries in that line-up.) The visual depth and the amazingly rich colour combinations, devised and achieved by Michael Powell and DP Jack Cardiff, are truly a wonder. The script, by Emeric Pressburger with additional dialogue by Keith Winter, is a different matter. All in all, I’m not sure The Red Shoes is a cut above Black Narcissus and I don’t think it’s as entertaining.
Music student Julian Craster is in the audience at Covent Garden for a performance by the Ballet Lermontov of ‘Heart of Fire’. The score has supposedly been composed by Julian’s teacher, Professor Palmer (Austin Trevor); Julian soon realises the music has been nicked from one of his own compositions. At an after-show party hosted by socialite Lady Neston (Irene Browne), her niece, Victoria (Vicky) Page (Moira Shearer), ballet-mad and an aspiring dancer, is introduced to Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), impresario of the company that bears his name and who invites Vicky to one of their rehearsals. Julian meanwhile writes to Lermontov to protest Palmer’s plagiarism and gains an audience with the great man. After hearing Julian play one of his own pieces at the piano, Lermontov offers him a job on the spot – as répétiteur to the company orchestra and deputy to Livingstone Montague (Esmond Knight), the orchestra’s senior conductor. Thrilled to accept Lermontov’s invitation, Vicky and Julian turn up at the theatre the same day and soon are both leading lights with the Ballet Lermontov. Vicky gets the chance to dance and Lermontov sees her potential. He creates a new ballet in which she’ll have the starring role and for which Julian will write the music: ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Red Shoes, whose selfish, dance-crazy (anti-)heroine falls under the spell of the title footwear, with macabre results.
The new ballet – staged by Powell and Pressburger as an uninterrupted, seventeen-minute sequence – is a huge hit. Vicky becomes the company’s prima ballerina; Julian is commissioned to write new scores. They work closely together and fall in love – to the fury of the (Diaghilev-like) Lermontov, who’s furiously possessive of his stars. Julian is fired and Vicky leaves the company to marry him but Lermontov then persuades her to ‘put on the red shoes again’ and reprise the role that made her name. On the first night of the revival in Monte Carlo, Julian, who should have been conducting the premiere of his opera at Covent Garden, confronts Vicky in her dressing room. He begs her to abandon the performance and return with him to England. Lermontov insists that her true destiny is with him and a life on stage. She opts for the latter and her vanquished husband leaves for the railway station but the red shoes Vicky’s wearing for her role have other ideas. They propel her from the theatre to the station. Julian sees and runs towards her but Vicky leaps from a balcony into the path of an approaching train. Back at the theatre, a stunned Lermontov comes onstage to inform the audience that ‘Miss Page is unable to dance tonight – nor indeed any other night’. In honour of Vicky, the company goes ahead with the performance. A moving spotlight indicates the empty space she should have occupied.
As a melodramatic exploration of the artistic calling as a matter of life and death (to quote another Archers title), The Red Shoes is far superior to a grim, up-itself imitator like Black Swan (2010). Powell and Pressburger supply choreography not just in the dance sections but in less expected places too: in the movement of the opening sequence, as students burst into Covent Garden and dash for seats in the gods; in Anton Walbrook’s intricate, elegant hand movements. Except for Walbrook, Marius Goring and Esmond Knight, though, the cast are pretty hard to take – especially Massine, who, as the dancer Grischa Ljubov, pantomimes even when Ljubov is offstage. Moira Shearer is lovely in her first scenes – her face expresses Vicky’s innocence very naturally – and her litheness as a dancer is, at least in long retrospect, poignant. As the doomed heroine of ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, Shearer lets her dancing do the talking but her limitations are exposed as Vicky Page gets more lines to speak. She simply isn’t a good enough actress to dramatise the character’s art-versus-love dilemma convincingly. The climax to ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, which occurs halfway through the film, is highly effective. The staging of Vicky’s tragic end, which concludes things, is garishly shoddy. As the theatre performance from which she’s unavoidably absent ends, Vicky lies on a stretcher, bleeding to death, and asks Julian to remove her red shoes.
2 January 2023
