The Red Shoes- 1948- A Movie Produced, Directed and Written by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - with a Paris Setting

 The Red Shoes- 1948- A Movie Produced, Directed and Written by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger - with a Paris Setting

Part of my Participation in Paris in July 2023 

https://wordsandpeace.com/2023/06/30/paris-in-july-2023/

Martin Scorese on The Red Shoes 

https://youtu.be/qVeoOTahOvI

To me The Red Shoes is cinema as High Art. It may be seen for free on YouTube. I have watched it ten times since I was first made aware of it by Martin Scorese. To me, I have no formal training in the cinema, it is a flawless masterpiece.

The film follows Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a ballerina who joins the world-renowned Ballet Lermontov, owned and operated by Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who tests her dedication to the ballet by making her choose between her career and her marriage and romance with composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). It is based on a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale.

From the movie:

"Boris Lermontov  -The Ballet of the Red Shoes is from a fairytale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of red shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening, she is tired and wants to go home, but the red shoes are not tired. In fact, the red shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes go on.

Julian Craster: What happens in the end?

Boris Lermontov: Oh, in the end she dies"

The majority of the cast were professional dancers. Filming of The Red Shoes took place in mid-1946, primarily in France and England.

Upon release, The Red Shoes received critical acclaim, especially in the United States, where it received a total of five Academy Award nominations, including a win 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.

Retrospectively, The Red Shoes is regarded as one of the best films of Powell and Pressburger's partnership and one of the greatest films of all time. It was voted the 9th greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute in 1999. 

Having recently read Jennifer Homans brilliant biography of George Balanchine and her history of Ballet my appreciation of The Red Shoes was amplified. Boris Lermontov, like Balanchine did not like his dancers to have boyfriends and was adamantly opposed to ballerinas marrying.

"Boris Lermontov: You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never." 

 His Manor was imperious, The

 Lermontov Ballet was the apex of the art. Victoria Page, from an aristocratic wealthy family, sought not monetary rewards but to reach her highest level of artistic achievement and Lermontov could bring her there.

We follow the company from Paris to Monte Carlo. The settings of street scenes in Paris and the seashore in Monte Carlo are wonderful. Scenes in hotels and Lermontov's home show a Baroque era splendour. The support characters are perfectly realized. The music is preformed by The Royal Philomonic Orchestra. The people are beautiful, I laughed in agreement when Victoria Page's aunt described Lermontov as "An Attractive Brute". Trains play a very important role. Scorese praises the use of color. There is a 15 minute ballet sequence.

I suggest you watch the movie then watch the Scorese presentation then watch the movie again. The sheer beauty of this film is amazing.  

I will soon post on another film by Powell and Pressburger, the 1949 Elusive Pimpernel, set in France and England after the French Revolution.  

Mel Ulm