The Red Shoes - Part II

Title from the 1948 film

The New York Times
November 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist

Ballet’s Mean Streets

By MAUREEN DOWD

Some movies you have to watch whenever they’re on.

One of those, for me, is “The Red Shoes.” Like its doomed heroine, I’m pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.

There are many great works of art about obsession, from Heathcliff’s wailing to Ahab’s whaling, but this is surely the most gorgeously haunting. The destructive obsession portrayed here is not with a lover or outside object of desire. It’s about the tyranny of creativity.

As the white-skinned, blue-blooded ballerina Vicky Page, Moira Shearer dons the red slippers and is forced to choose between love and art.

There was never a screen pairing more magical than Moira and Technicolor. The flame-haired Scottish dancer is so radiant in the Criterion DVD of the 1948 classic directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that it’s impossible to believe she could glow more brightly. But in the lovingly polished version of the British movie that debuted at Cannes and is now showing at Film Forum in New York, Moira is even more incandescent.

The original backers of the movie had so little confidence that a stylized tragic ballet film could do well that they didn’t even give it an official London premiere.

Now Martin Scorsese calls “The Red Shoes” “one of the true miracles of film history.” He long ago began an obsessive campaign to restore Powell’s reputation. His Film Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive have taken the lead in digitally alchemizing the movie from cracked, shrunk, moldy negatives.

Scorsese fell in love with the movies of Powell and Pressburger when he was an asthmatic kid living in a four-room tenement apartment in New York, watching “Million Dollar Movie” on TV and going to theaters with his dad.

“They have a flair and flamboyance you don’t usually find in films being made at that time,” he told me. “And a fearlessness about emotion. They create worlds that take no prisoners.”

In “Black Narcissus,” their 1947 movie about a lustful nun in the Himalayas, played by Deborah Kerr — they seemed drawn to redheads for Technicolor — the sister faints from sexual desire and the screen goes orange. “That’s such a wonderful way to express desire,” Scorsese marveled.

In a letter to Kerr in the early ’40s, Pressburger laid out their manifesto, including: “No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness.”

In the early ’70s, Scorsese tracked down the broke and discredited Powell in London and took him to a pub.

“Michael was very surprised to hear that his films had thrilled a younger audience and given fuel to the imagination of myself and Brian De Palma and Francis Coppola,” Scorsese once recalled. “He went home that night and recorded in his diary that he felt his blood course through his veins again after meeting us in the bar.”

In 1980, Coppola invited Powell to become a consultant at Zoetrope Studios. He moved to America and married Scorsese’s film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

It is interesting that Powell twice counseled Scorsese against the color red. He didn’t like the red boxing gloves in the early rushes of “Raging Bull” and urged Scorsese to switch to a black-and-white film. (He did.) Powell told him “Mean Streets” had too much red lighting and he should take some out. (He didn’t.)

“The Red Shoes” is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.

The shimmering Moira Shearer could never take off the red shoes, either.

“To be constantly associated with that one film is really quite dismaying,” she once said. “It’s as though I’d done nothing else in my life. I mean, it’s odd, when you’re 61, to be haunted by something you’ve done when you were 21!”

She resisted doing the movie, finding the script “silly and banal”; she feared it would deflect her from a classical ballet career. And when she died at 80 in 2006, her husband dismissively called her film work “a bit of a distraction.”

Shearer said she faced hostility when she returned to the ballet world from some who considered her overnight movie fame frivolous. She always worried that she was succeeding more for her looks than her dancing.

She was eclipsed by Margot Fonteyn, married, had four children and receded. She wrote a book about her experiences with George Balanchine. As Clive Barnes wrote in Dance Magazine, “She had a disappointing and disappointed dance career.”

In later years, Shearer was asked to give her occupation in “Who’s Who.”

“Writer,” she replied.

Personal comment: It would be interesting to know what Shearer’s career would have been like in classical ballet if she had not done the film. Dame Nanette de Valois the founder of Sadler’s Wells Ballet as the company was known at the time of the film could be every bit as emperious as Boris Lermontov and Margot Fonteyn was the star. Many incredably talented women languished in Fonteyn’s shadow during her too long career with de Valois’s companies. When the company toured the U.S. after The Red Shoes became a huge hit in America everyone wanted to see Shearer dance rather than Fonteyn and management, and one presumes Fonteyn, were not happy. Here is The Red Shoes trailer from the un-restored original film.

The Red Shoes

Moira Shearer as Victoria Page in The Red Shoes

The New York Times
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: November 5, 2009

A Tragic Ballerina Dances Again, Her Shoes Now Redder Than Ever

“Why do you want to dance?” barks the imperious ballet impresario Boris Lermontov in “The Red Shoes,” the 1948 masterpiece from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

“Why do you want to live?” answers the young ballerina, Victoria Page, her face pale and pure as cream. It’s a mad, beautiful line, yet she utters it so easily, without apparent effort or guile, that you know that she means it and that you’re meant to believe it too. She dances because she must, because there is no choice. She dances until the sweat beads on her brow, and the abyss opens. Mostly, she dances because she is a flame for art, blazing bright until she is snuffed out.

Widely deemed the most famous ballet film ever made, “The Red Shoes,” directed by Powell and written by Pressburger (officially sharing the credits), has been the inspiration for countless bleeding feet and soaring artistic passions since its release. It is likely to seduce yet new generations of seekers and true believers, some of whom will doubtless be practicing demi-pliés on the ticket line when the movie — recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with help from Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and several other groups — opens at Film Forum on Friday for a two-week run. This is essential viewing because even if you think you have seen the movie before its restoration, if you’re under 60, you probably haven’t seen it anywhere near its original Technicolor glory.

This born-again version of “The Red Shoes,” digitally resuscitated from battered prints and negatives, should surprise even those who have watched the fine Criterion DVD. A film like few others, made like few others — the Powell and Pressburger partnership remains sui generis — it reaches high and strikes its mark, at times improbably. It’s an insistently designed work of non-naturalism, daubed with startling, unreal, gaudy colors that seem to have been created to blast away the last traces of wartime drear. The colors in “The Red Shoes” don’t just exist, they also express. “Color and I are one,” the painter Paul Klee said. When watching “The Red Shoes,” it’s easy to imagine Powell saying the same. Instead, he said, “I am cinema.”

Loosely taken from the macabre Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Red Shoes” follows Vicky (Moira Shearer, a real ballerina, making her film debut) from her first determined steps in the corps to stardom in Lermontov’s company. Partly based on the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev — with some Powell thrown in — and played with mesmerizing ferocity by the Viennese-born actor Anton Walbrook, Lermontov drives Vicky toward perfection, insisting that she sacrifice everything for art, even her heart. But she falls in love with Julian Craster (Marius Goring), the composer of the work that makes her a star, succumbing to him as she rehearses the ballet. Enraged by her supposed betrayal, Lermontov fires Julian, and Vicky quits, only to later and fatally return.

Vicky is caught between Julian, the selfish lover who wants her only for himself, and Lermontov, whose obsession with her appears to transcend the sexual, suggesting a kind of demonic possession. A suave number partial to sunglasses, Lermontov appears several times in and on trains belching clouds of smoke, an evocation of Vicky’s catastrophic final leap. (According to Powell, Ms. Shearer leapt without a double, landing on a mattress.) Until then, Vicky spins and spins and spins, her vertiginous journey visually echoed in the images of fans and a rotating record and, in one astonishing scene, a seemingly endless spiral staircase on which she flees the theater and its fantasies to head into the hard light of the real world.

“The ballet of ‘The Red Shoes,’ ” Lermontov explains to Julian early in the film, “is the story of a young girl who is devoured by an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes, goes to the dance. And first all goes well, and she’s very happy.” She tires, but: “The red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the streets, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forest, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on.” Then what happens? Julian asks, not realizing that he’s asking for the end of his own story.

“Oh,” Lermontov says with a small wave of the hand. “In the end she dies.”

This is about as much exposition as Pressburger provides in a screenplay that, while richly embroidered with memorable, quotable lines (“Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat”), is a vehicle for cinema, not speeches. Indeed, several nondance scenes unfold without a word, as does the spectacular 15-minute ballet centerpiece. (The choreographer Robert Helpmann dances the part of the boy, while Léonide Massine, a Diaghilev protégé, makes a dazzling and suitably devilish cobbler.) Somewhat reminiscent of Busby Berkeley’s more fantastic dance numbers, the ballet doesn’t take place on a conventional, constricted stage, for the viewing pleasure of a clapping audience, but in a purely cinematic realm, complete with trick photography.

In this strange and violent dance, the theater’s walls melt away, and the barriers between Vicky and her character, between art and life, at which Lermontov has been steadily pounding, give way. That life and art are finally inseparable is a theme of the story, or perhaps its lesson. This refusal of barriers extends to the filmmaking itself, which draws on other arts — literature, painting, dance and music — and recombines them into cinema. That synthesis, in turn, is mirrored by the creative partnership of the two filmmakers, who, calling themselves the Archers, usually shared the credit “written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” an acknowledgment of the intimacy of their collaboration and shared vision.

A box office disappointment in Britain, where it was indifferently released by the producer J. Arthur Rank, “The Red Shoes” was a smash elsewhere, playing for two years in Manhattan. Not long ago I met a woman who said she watched it every week for a year when it opened in Los Angeles. She went on to dance with Arthur Freed’s unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, home to some of the most glorious film musicals not made by Powell and Pressburger. In his autobiography Powell writes that Gene Kelly repeatedly showed “The Red Shoes” to MGM executives before getting permission to make Vincente Minnelli’s “American in Paris” — an influence most evident in the long ballet Kelly dances in that film. Time rushes by. The red shoes dance on.

Personal Comment: The film The Red Shoes was the first ballet film I ever saw. My Mom had it on VHS when I was 5 y/o and I watched it over and over. Mom being a dancer herself wanted me to see the glory and heartbreak of ballet saying - when my father protested about the violent ending - that I was not too young to learn about determination and life’s great passions. The Red Shoes has inspired me my entire career – to put ballet first, take my pleasure when and where I can and not get too emotionally tangled with a man. I think it is a film every young girl should see.