Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Producers: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Additional Dialogue: Keith Winter
Based on the original screenplay by: Emeric Pressburger
Based on a story by: Hans Christian Andersen
Director of photography: Jack Cardiff
Editor: Reginald Mills
Production Designer: Hein Heckroth
Music/ Music Arranger / Conductor: Brian Easdale
Cast
Marius Goring (Julian Craster)
Jean Short (Terry)
Gordon Littman (Ike)
Julia Lang (a balletomane)
Bill Shine (a balletomane's mate)
Léonide Massine (Grischa Ljubov)
Anton Walbrook (Boris Lermontov)
Austin Trevor (Professor Palmer)
Esmond Knight (Livingstone 'Livy' Montague)
Erie Berry (Dimitri)
Irene Browne (Lady Neston)
Moira Shearer (Victoria Page)
Ludmilia Tcherina (Irina Boronskaja)
Jerry Verno (George, stage door keeper)
Robert Helpmann (Ivan Boleslawsky)
Albert Bassermann (Ratov)
Derek Elphinstone (Lord Oldham)
Madame Rambert (herself)
Joy Rawlins (Gladys, Vicky's friend)
Marcel Poncin (M. Boudin)
Michael Bazalgette (M. Rideaut)
Yvonne André (Vicky's dresser)
Hay Petrie (Boison)
Alan Carter (solo dancer / assistant maître de ballet)
Joan Harris (solo dancer / assistant maîtresse de ballet)
Joan Sheldon, Paula Dunning, Bryan Ashbridge,
Denis Carey, Lynne Dorval, Helen Ffrance,
Robert Dorning, Eddie Gaillard, Paul Hammond,
Tommy Linden, Trisha Linova, Anna Marinova,
Guy Massey, John Regan, Peggy Sager,
Ruth Sendler
(dancers (The Ballet of The Red Shoes))
Hilda Gaunt
(accompanist (The Ballet of The Red Shoes))
Richard George (doorman) *
Crew
Production Companies: Archers Film Productions,
Independent Producers,
J. Arthur Rank Film Productions
Assistant Producer: George R. Busby
Production Assistant: Gwladys Jenks *
Production Secretary: Marjorie Mein *
Assistant Director: Sydney S. Streeter
2ndAssistant Director: Kenneth Rick *
3rd Assistant Director: J.M. Gibson *
Continuity: Doreen North
Assistant Continuity: Joanna Busby *
Colour Consultant: Natalie Kalmus
Associate Colour Consultant: Joan Bridge
Camera Operator: Christopher Challis
Technicolor Composite Photography:
F. George Gunn, E. Hague
Focus Puller: George Minassian *
Clapper Loaders: Bob Kindred, John Morgan *
Stills: George Cannon *
Assistant Stills: Alistair Phillips *
Special Stills: Cornel Lucas *
Liaison Editor: John Seabourne Jr.
Assistant Editor: Noreen Ackland *
2nd Assistant Editors:
Tony Haynes, Laurie Knight *
Art Director: Arthur Lawson
Assistant Art Director: Elven Webb *
Draughtsmen:
Don Picton, V.B. Wilkins, V. Shaw, Alan Withy,
G. Heavens, Bernard Goodwin *
Painting: Ivor Beddoes
Special: Joseph Natanson
Scenic Artist: Alfred Roberts
Miss Shearer's Dresses: Jacques Fath, Mattli
Mile Tcherina's Dresses: Carven
Wardrobe: Dorothy Edwards, Elsie Withers *
Masks: Terence Morgan II *
Make-up supervisor: Ernie Gasser *
Make-up: Eric Carter *
Music of Cafe de Paris Sequence:
Ted Heath's Kenny Baker Swing Group
Music Played by: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Aria Sung by: Margherita Grandi
The Red Shoes Ballet Sequence Conductor:
Thomas Beecham
Music Recording: Ted Drake
Choreographer of the ballet the Red Shoes:
Robert Helpmann
Part of the Shoemaker Created / Danced by:
Léonide Massine
Sound: Charles Poulton
Boom operator: Al Burton *
Dubbing: Gordon McCullum
Dubbing Editor: Leonard Trumm *
United Kingdom 1948
136 mins
* Uncredited
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The Last Nitrate Picture Show
The Red Shoes
This nitrate print comes from the bfi's National Film and Television Archive.
There have been other movies that espoused art for art's sake, but most
were for specialised audiences; The Red Shoes' melodramatic treatment
of ballet managed to touch a vast public.
Prior to the film's realisation, director Michael Powell and writer-producer
Emeric Pressburger had established an independent company called The Archers.
Separately, both men did excellent work; together they were a superb team.
The duo had earned extravagant praise for the 1946 films A Matter of
Life and Death (released in the U.S. as Stairway to Heaven)
and Black Narcissus. Pressburger had written The Red Shoes
in 1939 for Alexander Korda as a vehicle for Korda's star and future wife,
Merle Oberon. During May of 1946, The Archers bought the script for £9,000
and Pressburger rewrote it as a darker, heavier yarn.
During the project's planning stages at Pinewood Studios, the film's art
direction was assigned to Alfred Junge, the great German designer responsible
for the superb decor of most previous Archer productions. However, Powell
decided that Junge's style was too stolid for the ballet sequence. Without
informing Junge, he assigned the ballet sequence to Hein Heckroth, a German
artist previously hired by Junge to design costumes and title art for
A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. When Junge
became privy to this reassignment, he walked off the production. Heckroth
inherited the whole show, with art director Arthur Lawson at his side to
provide technical know-how.
Assigned to compose a ballet 'of concert hall quality' was Allan Gray, another
past Archers contributor. He was unable to deliver the sort of music the
producers had in mind, though, and his work was eventually scrapped. Replacing
Gray was Brian Easdale, 38, who had scored Black Narcissus and whose
first opera was produced when he was 17. In addition, Easdale conducted
all of the score save for the ballet, which he insisted should be conducted
by Sir Thomas Beecham, who recorded the soundtrack with the Royal Philharmonic.
To depict the joys and terrors of artistic creation required a strong cast
and brilliant artists; the film-makers had to form their own ballet troupe
and envision a unique world. The Australian choreographer Robert Helpmann,
a premier danseur at Sadler's Wells and leading actor at the Old
Vic, portrayed Boleslawsky and choreographed the ballet. The legendary Léonide
Massine, protégé of the great Sergei Diaghilev and producer-choreographer
of numerous ballets, was secured to portray Ljubov, as well as to create
and dance the role of the Shoemaker. Dominating the acting is Austrian Anton
Walbrook, an international star who gives an unforgettable performance as
the almost satanic but ultimately vulnerable Lermontov. Popular assumption
holds that Lermontov is based on the tyrannical Russian ballet impresario
Sergei Diaghilev, who died in 1929. Powell and Pressburger both insisted
that Lermontov had a bit of Diaghilev in him, but in reality he was more
a combination of Alexander Korda, Powell and Pressburger - perhaps with
an added dash of Svengali.
The other male lead of the dramatic triangle was oddly cast. Not only was
Marius Goring considerably older than the character of Julian Craster, but
the actor was famous for his stage and screen portrayals of homicidal psychopaths.
Nevertheless, he does a remarkable job as a romantic lead. The film's other
players proved equally adept. The great 80-year-old German star, Albert
Basserman, brings a realistic presence as the designer, Ratov. Esmond Knight,
a pre-war romantic actor partially blinded during his tenure as an officer
aboard the ill-fated H.M.S. Prince of Wales - amid the battle in which the
Nazi sea-raider Bismarck was sunk
[Not quite, when the Bismarck first broke out through the Denmark Strait
she was challenged by HMS Hood & HMS Prince of Wales. The Bismarck sank
the Hood with nearly all hands. The Prince of Wales got a few good shots
in that did some damage & it was during this exchange that Esmond was
blinded. The Bismarck was then hunted down over the next few days by
a large section of the Royal Navy.]
- is excellent as the conductor, Livy.
[A playboy baronet - not really based on Sir Thomas Beecham of course
<G> ]
The beauty and talent of Ludmilla Tcherina, star ballerina of the Monte
Carlo Ballet, are strong assets to her role as a dancer named Boronskaja.
In terms of acting, however, the film's true grandeur was provided by the
radiant thespian who took the part of the ballerina: Moira Shearer.
Powell discovered his 20-year-old star early in 1946. Shearer was a beautiful
red-headed Scot who belonged to the Royal Ballet. Fiercely dedicated to
her art, she had no interest in movies, and rejected The Red Shoes
because the script -was too unlike the real ballet world. For nearly a
year, the producers tried to persuade her, while Mme. Ninette de Valois,
the founder and head of the Royal Ballet, insisted that she remain with
their company. Powell considered using Ann Todd or Hazel Court with real
dancers doubling the ballet scenes, but Helpmann, Pressburger and Heckroth
dissuaded him from doing so.
Suddenly, Shearer relented; fed up with Powell's bothersome visits, Mme.
de Valois had asked her to accept the offer and then return to the ballet
post haste. She performed a screen test in May 1947, and began work on the
film the following month.
Principal photography of The Red Shoes commenced on 5 June 1947,
at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. After a week, the company moved to the south
of France, where Powell and Pressburger searched the coastline between Monte
Carlo and Nice for a setting that resembled Heckroth's sketches of Lermontov's
villa. They found their site in the Villa Leopolda, near Villefranche, which
was approached via the long, weed-choked stairway ascended by Victoria Page
in the film.
Shearer arrived at Monte Carlo in late June. One Saturday night she left
the stage at Covent Garden, boarding a plane the following morning to make
a four a.m. makeup call on Monday. An hour later, she was on-set for her
first scene: Victoria's death on the train tracks. Shearer had to lie for
hours under the Mediterranean sun, partly beneath a train dripping oil onto
her. A battery of huge silver reflectors amplified the heat and glare, causing
the actress to suffer a sunburn and sore eyes. When she was placed on the
rubber stretcher, which had lain in the sun, her back became blistered.
Needless to say, Shearer's first day before the camera did little to improve
her attitude toward movies.
Shearer executed the close shots of her death leap at Monte Carlo, doing
three takes as she jumped onto a concealed box. (Joy Rawlings was her double
her for the long shots.) On one take, Shearer tottered forward and nearly
fell. Much later, at Pinewood, she played the scene in which she is shown
falling through empty space. Refusing to be doubled, she jumped headlong
from a 15-foot parapet onto two mattresses placed over hay. During the first
take, she landed on her head and shoulder with no harm done; on take two,
however, she struck headfirst and wrenched her neck quite badly.
Upon returning to London, the company filmed exteriors at Covent Garden,
beginning workdays at 7 a.m. Posters announcing the Lermontov Ballet were
mounted over the Sadler's Wells Ballet signs. Soon thereafter a queue formed,
with patrons waiting for the box office to open! Photos and drawings were
made of the stage door on Flower Street, which was duplicated in detail
at Pinewood.
Jack Cardiff, BSC, who had just won an Academy Award for his Technicolor
photography on The Archers' Black Narcissus, was the obvious choice
to film The Red Shoes.
[Ed. note: Mr. Cardiff was also a member of the ASC at the time, but later
withdrew from the organization because he primarily worked in Britain.]
When Powell initially asked Cardiff how much he liked ballet, however, the
cameraman replied, "Not much. It's so precious all those sissies prancing
about." Nonetheless, Powell sent him to Covent Garden every night to watch
performances of the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company, and Cardiff soon became
intrigued by the possibilities of a ballet film.
"Michael was a cameraman's dream," Cardiff wrote in his autobiographical
book Magic Hour. "He nearly always accepted any ideas I put forth with enthusiastic
support. He very rarely dithered or had doubts about things. Like all good
minds, he possessed a nervous vitality."
After completion of The Red Shoes, the American-born Cardiff
[No he wasn't, he was born in Yarmouth, England]
offered a London reporter the following comparison regarding the differing
types of Technicolor offered on either side of the Atlantic: 'As a member
of the American Society of Cinematographers, I wish I could say Hollywood's
Technicolor is better than Britain's, but unfortunately, such is not always
the case. For several years the British studios' Technicolor has surpassed
Hollywood's in many respects. I attribute this superiority not to any greater
proficiency or artistry of British cameramen but, oddly enough, to the recent
World War. The war-induced coal shortage in England forced rationing of
electrical power ... Since Technicolor requires more intense illumination
than does black-and-white, many studios eliminated colour photography altogether,
but a few struggled on under rationing conditions.
'To the surprise of everyone, Technicolor was improved by, the reduced lighting,'
he added. 'Instead of blatant, glaring colours, the underlit film produced
soft, pleasing pastel tints. I used the same technique in shooting The
Red Shoes, and to good advantage, particularly in recording the beauty
of lovely Moira Shearer ... and the gorgeous settings by Hein Heckroth.'
Because many of the picture's interiors were of considerable scope, the
150-amp lights available in England proved insufficient, so Cardiff went
to Hollywood to confer with lighting experts. Peter Mole, of Mole-Richardson,
told him that M-R had just made a powerful 225-amp arc lamp with a wide
beam "the Brute," a name which persists even today. Two prototypes had been
built, but the light was not ready for marketing. Cardiff persuaded Mole
to ship the prototypes to England, and the Brute made its highly successful
debut in The Red Shoes.
Such an abundance of light, however, created another problem: a spotlight
would be needed for the ballet sequences, but at the time, there was no
spot of sufficient power to register as such through the general lighting
of a scene. Conferences with Mole and lens manufacturer Taylor Hobson Cooke
led to the design of a new water-cooled, 300-amp spot that could place 1,200
footcandles on a subject some 100 feet away.
Christopher Challis, a distinguished lighting cameraman in his own right
(whose credits would later include The Archers' subsequent 1951 picture
The Tales of Hoffmann), temporarily demoted himself to operate the
camera for Cardiff on The Red Shoes. 'It was a decision I never regretted,
for the picture turned out to be one of the most memorable I have ever had
the privilege of working on,' Challis says in his book Are They Really
So Awful?
Cardiff and Challis experimented together and separately with camera speeds,
filters, and means of manipulating the cumbersome Technicolor camera more
freely. During a 'Swan Lake' scene in the film, the camera actually spins
to show Vicki's point of view as she executes a pirouette.
The 'Ballet of the Red Shoes' itself is an intricately tooled 17-minute
sequence played without an audience reaction cut. The ballet was filmed
last and took six weeks to shoot. The hard-driven cast and crew were given
a welcome two-week vacation in mid-August while the dancers rehearsed in
a London studio and the sets and stage effects were prepared. A scratch
on Shearer's side developed an abscess, requiring minor surgery and several
days of hospitalisation.
Six months before production, Heckroth began working on his sets day and
night under a daylight lamp, drafting some 2,000 sketches. For the ballet,
he painted 120 scenes which were then filmed in sequence; Easdale's score
was adapted to match the paintings, each of which was held for whatever
length was needed. Cardiff and Challis then adapted the camera angles and
lighting indicated in the paintings, as the dancers performed to musical
playback. Each shot, when completed, replaced the corresponding painting.
In his book, Cardiff notes, 'I had a gadget made to change the camera speeds
during a scene so I could go from normal speed to double speed [48 fps].
This was used to great effect when a dancer leapt in the air; just before
the apex of flight, I slowed the action for a fraction of a second, so that
they appeared to hover in the air. I changed speed with pirouettes so that
a dancer would start off at normal speed and then, as I changed the speed
to only four frames a second, whirl faster and faster until she was only
a spinning blur. This [technique] became highly successful in what was called
"The Paper Dance" with Moira.'
Other effects were achieved through similarly simple techniques. A shift
from day to night resulted from multiple dissolves between five background
paintings. The gigantic falling leaves in one sequence were actually bits
of cellophane dropped from wires into a set fashioned from transparent sheets.
The stage-set scene of the auditorium being engulfed by huge waves was accomplished
by doubling a shot of the raging sea at Cornwall over the studio set, which
was augmented with a glass painting.
One particular painting reveals Shearer dancing through space. Towering
mountains appear in the background, along with several other ranges in the
distance; bizarre, multi-coloured wisps twist past in the foreground. Each
of the mountain ranges and clouds were painted on separate glass sheets,
in front of which was a flat glass water tank; chemicals that created streaks
and trails without clouding the water were dropped from various heights
into the tank. A shot of Shearer suspended on wires was photographed separately.
In post-production, the dancer was matted into the scenes by George Gunn,
a British Technicolor technician who had developed the Gunnshot travelling-matte
process.
In January of 1948, a rough cut of The Red Shoes was screened for
Rank Film executives; the top brass hated the film. Pressburger then screened
the picture for Korda, who made him a purchasing offer. Rank decided not
to sell, and extended completion money on the stipulation that Powell and
Pressburger would take a £10,000 reduction in their salaries and an
increase
in their share of the profits from 25 to 37.5%. Rank representatives later
sat silently through a private screening of the final cut and stalked out
without a word.
Instead of the planned gala premiere and advanced-price presentation,
The Red Shoes was sent into general release. Most London critics
thought it a lavish flop. The movie was even angrily denounced at a U.S.
screening at Universal-International, which had a releasing agreement with
Rank. The 'turkey' was then shunted off to little Eagle Lion Pictures (a
Pathé Industries subsidiary partly backed by Rank) which opened the
film quietly as a reserved seat attraction at New York's Bijou. Overall,
the movie remained in release for two years and seven weeks, and did surprisingly
well in its roadshow and popular-price exhibitions as well.
Eventually, The Red Shoes made Variety's 'Golden Fifty' list of the
top money-makers of all time, and won Academy Awards for Heckroth, Lawson
and Easdale, as well as nominations for Best Picture, Best Story (Pressburger)
and Best Film Editing (Reginald Mills). This expressionistic fantasy is
now generally regarded as The Archers' greatest triumph.
(extracted from) American Cinematographer, February 1998
You can see the
full article here.
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