In the late 1940s, the directing duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were on the most unimpeachable run of successes. From One of Our Aircraft is Missing in 1942, the Archers, as the duo were known, the pair released such film as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going!, A Matter of Life and Death, and Black Narcissus. All of these are firmly in the British cinematic canon, newly introduced to each generation as each were restored and released as they hit various milestones. 2023 sees the 75th anniversary of perhaps their most beautiful and arguably their greatest work, The Red Shoes. A lavish technicolor marvel of fantasy and melodrama, this ballet drama is visually en pointe throughout yet streaked through with a sense of tragedy befitting a post-war world too shattered and weary for pure escapism.
The Red Shoes tells the tale of Victoria ‘Vicky’ Page (Moira Shearer), a ballet dancer who gets the role of her dreams when she impresses mercurial impresario Bors Lemantov (Anton Wallbrook). She is cast as the lead in ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’, based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen in which a ballerina is danced to death by exhaustion when she steps into the enchanted ballet shoes of the title. When Vicky falls for Julian Craster (Marius Goring), the composer of the ballet’s score, the competing forces in her life lead to tragedy.
The Red Shoes takes the titular dark fairy tale as something of a ‘play within a play’, but makes it integral to Vicky’s fate, with the result a beautiful magic realist tragedy that owes as much Anna Karenina as Hans Christian Andersen. Dunfermline ‘donna Moira Shearer dazzles as the gorgeous and guileless Victoria Page. Her slight inexperience in her first film role works for the character as she evolves from a malleable ingenue – albeit a spirited one as evinced by her first meeting with Lemontov – to a genuine star who begins to stamp her own authority. Through Vicky, the film is also way ahead of its time in the way it examines the consequences of a woman daring to want both a committed relationship and a career. Personified by Lemontov and Craster, the rock of her ballet and the hard place of her marriage will eventually grind her between them. Poor Vicky becomes the toy pulled between two jealous and spiteful children, and the ambiguity of her fate (under her own volition, or under the spell of the shoes) can be
The film is justly famous for its astonishing centrepiece that presents Vicky’s performance in ‘The Ballet of the Red Shoes’ as a glorious, unsettling, and chaotic fantasia that encompasses changing seasons, and the ballerina’s journey through astonishment and joy and madness. Ballet enthusiasts at the time criticised Powell and Pressburger for not staging an unadulterated ballet performance, but this misunderstands the function of cinema, and underestimates the artistic brilliance of the Archers as filmmakers. With a perfect marriage of Shearer’s technique (and that of Australian dancer Robert Helpmann, known by later generations as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) to the most modern visual effects, the scene is one of the finest ever out to film. It plugs straight into the senses and never lets up. If there is one criticism of the film (besides Vicky and Craster’s romance coming largely out of the blue and not quite convincing), it’s that it is never quite matched for the rest of the film.
This is barely a quibble. There’s little in The Red Shoes that demonstrates anything other than total mastery from Powell and Pressburger. There’s an argument that it’s their last great film, although the recently restored The Tales of Hoffman from 1951 is adored by some. There’s another argument that it’s one of the greatest films ever made. It’s a solid position to take. Some may prefer the unrepentant romanticism and metaphysical enquiry, and a never-better David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death, but in terms of ambition and sheer scale, The Red Shoes is a monumental achievement.
Rereleased in selected cinemas nationwide