Photograph from Red Shoes verdoux post. By popular demand, “The Red Shoes” is returning for another run at Film Forum, beginning February 19th. New York has always been kind to the movie, which, to the dismay of its creators, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, faltered and flopped when it opened on British screens in 1948. Salvation arrived in the form of the Bijou Theatre, at Broadway and Forty-fifth Street, where the film showed for more than two years. Ballet-crazy children—or “half the little girls in America,” as Powell put it—were an important sector of that audience, and I trust that some of them, now in their limber seventies, will head downtown to reforge an old acquaintance.Red Shoes Criterion Collection page - Red Shoes Powell and Pressburger page
What will they find? A blindingly rich and refulgent print, digitally restored by the Film Foundation and the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive. I’ve seen the same version on DVD, but watching “The Red Shoes,” whatever the quality, on the small screen is like drinking champagne, whatever the vintage, through a plastic straw. The movie should fill one’s vision no less comprehensively than a sunset, and Powell, like Turner before him—another hearty, romantic Englishman, whose eye gloried unashamedly in a given world—knew that reds, even at their most flaming, are never the whole story of a sunset. Consider Boris Lermontov (the incomparable Anton Walbrook), the impresario of a ballet company, who strolls into breakfast in a full-length gown of verdigris and gold. No Chinese emperor was more resplendently arrayed. As for the cigarette that he holds out, half smoked, to be taken and deposited by his valet, a whole civilization—urbane, authoritative, preposterous, and doomed—resides in that single gesture.
The film is a legend built on a legend. Lermontov, having acquired a new prima ballerina, Vicky Paige (Moira Shearer), plus a new composer, Craster (Marius Goring), mounts a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” in which a woman is danced to death by her own footwear. We see that work in its entirety, and the abandon with which it is sprung from the prison of the auditorium, into an unfeasible freedom of space, glances back to the opening scenes of Olivier’s “Henry V” (1944) and forward to “An American in Paris” (1951). Yet this is not, in the end, a film about ballet; it is a hymn to the risks of investing all that you are, and have, in the fugue and fury of the imaginative act. Look at Vicky as she dances solo, to a crummy gramophone, in a tiny London theatre on a rainy afternoon. She is not yet a star, but Lermontov has come to observe her; we see first his face, watching fiercely, and then hers, staring back—a milk-white death mask, filling the frame, with red and black dashes swooping from the corners of her eyes, and lips gleaming like the poisoned apple in “Snow White.” It is the most striking closeup in the history of cinema: not for Powell the yearning of Garbo, or the perplexity that Bergman found in Liv Ullmann, but a sudden, bright ecstasy that verges on the demonic, and more than enough, you might think, to scare those girls of 1948 out of their tutus. “The Red Shoes” is both suitable for children and beyond their ken: it treats art not as sedative or diversionary but as hard and supercharged, quite lethal to the danceless rhythms that most of our lives obey. No wonder Britain, still rationed in color, food, and feeling in the wake of an exhausting war, could not cope with what the movie proposed. Catch it here now, and you will not just be seeing an old film made new; you will have your vision restored.
-- Anthony Lane, New Yorker
We had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and die for Art.
Photograph from Cornel Lucas Collection.