Submitted by
Roger Mellor
Original at
http://www.audiencemag.com/still.html
Picture of the week
udience
magazine's
Still of
The Week
by
John
Teegarden
Oct. 15
Though more than fifty years old, The Red Shoes (1948) remains the
cinema's most famous and best loved ballet film. It creates the dancer's
backstage world with delightful color and conviction. The movie tells the
story of a beautiful and talented young woman (ravishing redhead Moira Shearer)
as she rises through the ranks of a world-famous dance company. All goes
splendidly until she falls for the passionate composer who's written the
score for her "Red Shoes" ballet. The company's Svengali-like impresario
(played to elegant perfection by Anton Walbrook) demands she choose between
art and her heart. "The dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of
human love will never be a great dancer!" he insists with icy contempt.
But unable to make this impossible choice, the poor girl goes mad.
The film takes as its metaphor, of course, the Hans Christian Andersen fairy
tale of the same name. It's a highly moralistic fable about an unfortunate
child who's infatuated by a pair of red dancing slippers. Once she puts
them on, she can never get them off and they force her to dance on and on-until
she meets a man with an ax! (The film tactfully omits the Andersen tale's
more macabre elements.) Pictured above is our heroine (Shearer, with Robert
Helpmann and Leonide Massine) tempted by the cobbler with his devilish shoes.
The ballet itself-depicting the fairy story in dance-is the movie's breathtaking
centerpiece. Vividly colorful, highly stylized, and lushly romantic, it's
a quintessential Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger sequence. (I suspect
it's what inspired, at least in part, all those elaborate ballet numbers
that were so popular in Hollywood musicals of the 1950s-in An American
in Paris, The Band Wagon, Invitation to the Dance,
Oklahoma, and the like.) The writing-directing-producing team of
Powell and Pressburger created some of the most entertaining and unstuffy
British films of the '40s and early '50s, including The Life and Death
of Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I'm Going, A Matter of Life
and Death, and Black Narcissus. Many, like The Red Shoes,
give touching insight to the deep-rooted conflict between the heart and
the head; reason and passion.
Not too surprisingly, the movies have rarely shown much interest in the
high-toned world of ballet. The Unfinished Dance, The Turning
Point, and Nijinsky are the only other films on the subject I
can immediately call to mind. (Yes, I'm trying to ignore this year's silly
Center Stage.) I would, however, like to take the opportunity to
draw your attention to the captivating Billy Elliott, which opens
this week. It's about an eleven-year-old boy who, despite the inevitable
objections of his working-class family, wants more than anything to be a
ballet dancer. The story may seem obvious, but the telling is so fresh and
true, I found the film quite irresistible. And its young star, Jamie Bell,
really can dance!
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