The Red Shoes ***** (1948, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina, Frederick Ashton) – Classic Movie Review 337

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s double Oscar-winning 1948 masterwork film The Red Shoes maintains its reputation as the best and most beloved of all dance movies. The 22-year-0ld Moira Shearer is a marvel. 

Writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s double Oscar-winning 1948 masterwork film The Red Shoes maintains its reputation as the best and most beloved of all dance movies. It has inspired generation after generation of young girls (and boys) to want to become dancers.

The 22-year-0ld Moira Shearer is a marvel. She makes a wonderfully vivid movie début here as the graceful young ballerina Victoria Page poised for dance superstardom as a protégé of the charismatic but bossy authoritarian ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). He demands total devotion to her art and loyalty to himself.

Unfortunately, she falls in love with Julian Craster (Marius Goring), the dashing young composer of The Red Shoes ballet that Lermontov is staging to showcase her talents. He’s disgusted, she leaves the company and marries Craster, but she still finds herself fatally uncertain about whose tune she should be dancing to — the composer (representing romance to her) or the impresario (representing art).

The story is rather freely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale with its theme about the clash between emotion and the heart versus discipline and art. Powell and Pressburger deal with this theme beautifully and artfully.

What to admire most here is hard to say exactly. Moira Shearer’s astoundingly graceful dancing and lovely acting, the authoritative performances of Walbrook and Goring, Hein Heckroth and Arthur Lawson’s Oscar-winning colour art direction-set decoration, Brian Easdale’s Oscar-winning score and cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s gorgeous and imaginative use of Technicolor are all equally inspiring. They vie equally to captivate the attention and imagination.

All these are brilliant. But above them maybe can be placed the sheer exuberance and joy of dance and the dance world conveyed in the movie by the great and indispensable Powell and Pressburger. You don’t get so many films that express joy. Most films go for thrills or wallows in tragedy. Joy is such a rare emotion to be enjoyed in movies, as in life, that I think this is why this film is so highly valued.

It is notoriously hard to bring the thrill, the excitement and the movement of the stage medium of dance to the movies, and Powell and Pressburger have surely triumphed.

The choreography is by the great Robert Helpmann, who also plays Ivan Boleslawsky and dances with Shearer. Also in the cast are Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina, Frederick Ashton and Madame Rambert from the ballet world, plus Austin Trevor, Esmond Knight, Eric Berry, Irene Browne, Jerry Verno, Albert Basserman [Bassermann] and Derek Elphinstone.

It received five Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Original Score and Best Art Direction. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and was named one of the Top 10 Films of the Year by the US National Board of Review. Notably, it won no BAFTA Film Awards.

It was digitally restoration at the UCLA Film and Television Archive to correct damage to the negatives, beginning in 2006. The restored film screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was then issued on Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection.

The Red Shoes runs 134 minutes, is made by The Archers, is distributed by General Film Distributors (UK) and Eagle-Lion Films and Universal Pictures (US), is shot by Jack Cardiff, and is scored by Brian Easdale.

It premiered in London on 22 July 1948, and was released in the UK on 6 September 1948. It was initially undervalued and under-patronised in the UK as the Rank Organisation distributors could not afford to spend much on promotion. However, after a slow start, it went on to become the sixth most popular film at the British box office in 1948. In the US it became one of the highest-earning British films of all time, with a record-breaking gross of more than $5 million on a budget of £505,600, the first British film to gross over $5 million in US cinema rentals.

Filming took place mainly in Paris, beginning in June 1947 for a planned 15 weeks, with some location shooting in London, Monte Carlo, and the Côte d’Azur. The stage and orchestra pit sequences were filmed at Pinewood Studios on new sets.

But the shoot overran to 24 weeks and the budget shot up to over £500,000, and because of this The Rank Organisation’s John Davis enforced £10,000 cuts to Powell and Pressburger’s salaries.

Eventually, Powell fell out with the all-powerful Rank Organisation, saying they did not understand the artistic merits of the film. The Archers decided to work with Alexander Korda instead,

The Red Shoes (1948, Moira Shearer).

Alas, Moira Shearer made only six more films, though she did host the Eurovision Song Contest in 1972! Powell employed her again for his Peeping Tom in 1961. She died in January 2006, aged 80.

Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina and Frederick Ashton are all back for Powell and Pressburger’s 1951 The Tales of Hoffmann.

©Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Film Review 337 derekwinnert.com

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The Red Shoes is famed for its 17-minute ballet sequence The Ballet of the Red Shoes.