In Powell and Pressburger's dazzling The Red Shoes, Victoria Page (Moira
Shearer), a young ballerina, dances to international stardom with a celebrated
European ballet company. But her successful career is complicated by her
love for - and marriage to - Julian Craster (Marius Goring), a struggling
composer, and her divided allegiance to Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook),
a martinet impresario. He tells her 'The dancer who relies on the comforts
of human love will never be a great dancer. Never !' However, though
The Red Shoes has been celebrated for nearly half a century as one of the
screen's great heterosexual love stories, the central relationship in the
film is essentially a gay one. yet it doesn't exist on the screen. Why the
paradox?
It is a well-known fact that Walbrook plays a renowned ballet impresario
who was based on Diaghilev. His extraordinary gay relationship with the
ill-fated Nijinsky evolves into two chaste, heterosexual professional associations
in TRS. One is with Craster, the young composer. His first appearance is
very queeny with heavy make-up under his blond locks, but this was probably
an attempt to make Goring look younger (he was thirty-six at the time).
the other - and more central to the story- is with the beautiful, red-haired
dancer Victoria. however even a superficial reading of the film reveals
that no such 'love' exists between Victoria and Lermontov, nor was it meant
to. Victoria is a slave to the dance; Lermontov has no personal feelings
for her whatsoever. She wishes to be a star of the ballet; he has the means
to make herone of the greatest. The bargain is struck. Her fate is sealed.
She dances - and dies.He will carry on, searching for another Victoria and
another.
The evidence is there. Just look again at their first meeting. Disturbing
(not romantic) music plays on the soundtrack, and this cleverly works against
and disrupts, the 'heterosexual romance'. He looks radiant, but not because
of her. It is the dance he loves, not the woman. 'I know nothing of her
charms, and I care less' he says. Also, Lermontov's appearance says it all.
He wears a 'dress'. He's decadent (he eats grapes). In short, he's a magnificent
queen, with flowers in his room, and a love of opera. He knows exactly what
he wants. Boronskaja (Lumilla Tcherina) says 'he has no heart', but she
is wrong, he has a heart of fire. He is cool in the middle of chaos, always
in control, never rude, never abuses his power. He's the gay man as perfect
leader. He doesn't have children, so he has to create. When he says 'it's
about time I sat down with my family', he is referring to the dance company,
his constructed family.
Walbrook's performance is magnificent. He is not Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster
or Chalrton Heston, not is he meant to be. Neither is he overtly camp, or
effeminate. His performance is subtle, and the actor seems totally at ease
with his role. Perhaps Walbrook was comfortable with Lermontov because he
was not playing a heterosexual, or love scenes with Moira Shearer. Said
Michael Powell: 'Anton conceals his humility and his warm heart behind perfect
manners that shield himlike a suit of armour...He goes underneath every
line of dialogue, every emotion. [ALIM p635-6]. Lermontov's dealings with
Julian Craster (who loves - and is loved by - Victoria), are curt and business-like.
This inhibits the dramatic richness of the film more than somewhat, and
it is regrettable that censorship prevented Walbrook and Goring having the
love affair that would have created exciting tensions. Goring's part is
essentially bland and underdeveloped. When they appear together, Walbrooks'
repressed feelings and tunnel vision are very much in evidence. The depth
and colouring this actor gave his role as the 'eternal beloved' friend of
Candy in [ Blimp] are missing from his role as Lermontov. Lermontov becomes
nasty towards Craster only when he realizes he is going to take Victoria,
and all those wonderful ballet roles she is going to play, away from him.
Says Craster: 'You're jealous of her'. Replies Lermontov: 'Yes, but not
in the way you're thinking'.
Apart from Walbrook and Lermontov, The Red Shoes is also important for the
way it portrays other gay characters. Gay ballet dancer and actor Robert
Helpmann is cast as Ivan Boleslawsky, Lermontov's principal male dancer.
He has a moderately important role in the backstage story. Wearing what
we now recognize as gay apparel (for example, the safari jacket he chooses
[in a fashion crime almost equalling Walbrook's dressing gown !] for the
dinner party scene must have de rigueur casual wear for certain gay men
in the 1940s and beyond), Helpmann acts in a restrained, but still markedly
gay manner. It is a pity that the core of the film's drama couldn't have
been similarly authentic. Throughout the film, Ivan and the other gay men
are seen as equals and professionals. For a change, they are not caricatured.
They integrate, work together and, in this respect The Red Shoes is a progressive
film.
In one of the most famous screen debuts, Moira Shearer almost obliterates
her male co-stars with he bewitching charm and intensity. The Red Shoes
is much loved for Moira's performance, and highly regarded for its astonishingly
rich decor, and Hans Christian Andersen ballet. The film remains one of
the most loved in British cinima, fitting in perfectly with the sado-masochistic
underpinnings of other popular camp melodramas of the era like Madonna of
the Seven Moons and The Seventh Veil (and Asquith's earlier Pygmalion).
That the relationship between master and slave betrays none of the erotic
charge of those films, is something which most audiences and many critics
have chosen to ignore. That The Red Shoes is only a beautiful shadow of
what it could have been is a source of regret. On the evidence of [Blimp],
Powell and Pressburger could have handled the subject with much greater
insight.
In Britain The Red Shoes was nominated for a British Academy Award as Best
British Film (it lost to Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol). In America it received
an Oscar nomination for Best Film, rare for a British film, but lost to
another home-grown success, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet. It received Oscars
for its art direction/set decorationand music score as well as nominations
for Pressburger's screenplay, and editing. In his 1993 book, Alternate Oscars,
Danny Peary named Walbrook his Best Actor of 1948. He noted Walbrook's elegance,
charm and wry wit, and said he gave a 'sad, disturbing portrait of a complex,
frustrated man who is so dedicated to its art - he calls ballet his religion
- that he suppresses his human qualites'.
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