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LXXXV: The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
British neo-romantic Technicolor, featuring the Svengali-like Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) who reluctantly admits Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) to his ballet company and, in time, casts her in the main role of a ballet, The Red Shoes, composed by the young Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Page and Craster at first battle then, inevitably, fall in love, at which point their place in the company is jeopardised.
Lermontov is an impressario who will stop at nothing to create art, and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process. Art is the only thing to live for - in fact the only thing to die for. Stuff like feelings, especially love, only gets in the way - although clearly he has feelings for her.
Central to the film is the ballet itself - designed like all of the film by artist Hein Heckroth (this DVD has the story board animated for this sequence as an extra). This is an ambiguous sequence which leaves realism behind - the auditorium is replaced by a seascape, a dancers turns into and out of newspapers, sets change impossibly. What is not clear is whether this is what the audience imagine they see (we've been positioned in the auditorium as the curtains open) or what Page sees (there's a conversation about what she will imagine) or both. It is her imagination, of course, that leads to the inevitable tragic ending.
(The ballet is about shoes that will not let you stop dancing - and suddenly there's a vision of something like The Hands of Orlac and there's a horror film in there trying to get out. Casting Walbrook - an Archers regular but also the tyrant in Gaslight makes sense.)
Another of the Top 100 Project
Totals: 85 (Cinema: 32; DVD: 48; TV: 5)
British neo-romantic Technicolor, featuring the Svengali-like Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) who reluctantly admits Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) to his ballet company and, in time, casts her in the main role of a ballet, The Red Shoes, composed by the young Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Page and Craster at first battle then, inevitably, fall in love, at which point their place in the company is jeopardised.
Lermontov is an impressario who will stop at nothing to create art, and doesn't care who gets hurt in the process. Art is the only thing to live for - in fact the only thing to die for. Stuff like feelings, especially love, only gets in the way - although clearly he has feelings for her.
Central to the film is the ballet itself - designed like all of the film by artist Hein Heckroth (this DVD has the story board animated for this sequence as an extra). This is an ambiguous sequence which leaves realism behind - the auditorium is replaced by a seascape, a dancers turns into and out of newspapers, sets change impossibly. What is not clear is whether this is what the audience imagine they see (we've been positioned in the auditorium as the curtains open) or what Page sees (there's a conversation about what she will imagine) or both. It is her imagination, of course, that leads to the inevitable tragic ending.
(The ballet is about shoes that will not let you stop dancing - and suddenly there's a vision of something like The Hands of Orlac and there's a horror film in there trying to get out. Casting Walbrook - an Archers regular but also the tyrant in Gaslight makes sense.)
Another of the Top 100 Project
Totals: 85 (Cinema: 32; DVD: 48; TV: 5)
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