Dance Movies

The Red Shoes (1948) is a British feature film about ballet, written, directed and produced by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as The Archers. Based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a pair of enchanted crimson ballet slippers, “The Red Shoes,” it tells the story of a young ballerina who joins an established ballet company and becomes the lead dancer in a new ballet called The Red Shoes, based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen about a woman who cannot stop dancing. The film stars Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook and Marius Goring and features Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina, renowned dancers from the ballet world, as well as Esmond Knight and Albert Basserman. It has original music by Brian Easdale and cinematography by Jack Cardiff, and is well regarded for its creative use of Technicolor.

Production

Pressburger originally wrote the screenplay for Alexander Korda as a vehicle for Korda’s future wife Merle Oberon. After some years had passed without the film being made, Powell and Pressburger rewrote the screenplay, including more emphasis on dancing, and produced it themselves.

Powell and Pressburger decided early on that they had to use dancers who could act rather than actors who could dance a bit. To create a realistic feeling of a ballet company at work, and to be able to include a fifteen minute ballet as the high point of the film, they created their own ballet company using many dancers from The Royal Ballet. The principal dancers were Robert Helpmann (who also choreographed the main ballet), Léonide Massine (who also choreographed the role of The Shoemaker), Ludmilla Tchérina and Moira Shearer.

Subsequent history

The Red Shoes received good reviews, but did not make much money at first in the UK, because the Rank Organisation could not afford to spend much on promotion due to severe financial problems exacerbated by the expense of Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). Also, the financial backers did not understand the artistic merits of the film.

At first, the film received only a limited release in the U.S., in a 110-week run. However, the success of this run showed Universal Studios that The Red Shoes was a worthwhile film. Universal took over the U.S. distribution in 1951 and it became one of the highest earning British films of all time.

When it was first previewed, many ballet critics in the UK and in the US wrote positively, pleased to see ballet portrayed so well on screen, but when they realised that it was universally popular, their reviews suddenly became quite dismissive of the film.

Brian Easdale’s score won an Oscar for “Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture” in 1948. The film also won an Oscar for “Best Art Direction-Set Decoration” for Hein Heckroth and Arthur Lawson. It was also nominated in the categories “Best Picture” (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), “Best Writing, Motion Picture Story” (Emeric Pressburger) and “Best Film Editing” (Reginald Mills). ^[11]

The Red Shoes led to a few other films that treated ballet seriously. It was only after he made the studio executives watch The Red Shoes a few times that Gene Kelly was able to include ballet in An American in Paris.

The Red Shoes is also arguably the most famous work done by Powell and Pressburger and is considered one of their great works as well as a classic of British cinema. The film is particularly known for its cinematography, particularly its use of colour. In the introduction for The Criterion Collection DVD of Jean Renoir’s The River, Martin Scorsese, who has long championed Powell and Pressburger’s works, considers The Red Shoes, along with the Renoir film to be the two most beautiful colour films.

Cast

• Moira Shearer as Vicky Page
• Marius Goring as Julian Craster
• Anton Walbrook as Boris Lermontov
• Léonide Massine as Grischa Ljubov
• Robert Helpmann as Ivan Boleslawsky
• Albert Bassermann as Sergei Ratov
• Ludmilla Tchérina as Irina Boronskaja
• Esmond Knight as Livingstone ‘Livy’ Montagne