RUPERT C HRISTIANSEN
The Red Shoes (1948)
Post-war Britain suffered its own version of lockdown. Grey and cold, straitened with rations and austerity, covered in soot and smog, scarred with the rubble of bomb sites, it struggled to keep cheerful in the wake of the Luftwaffe’s devastation. No Netflix, no supermarkets. With television and the longplaying record still not widely available, it’s not surprising that millions sought escape in a cinema that offered high romance, portrayed in the “saturated” richness of Technicolor.
No film succeeded in this respect more than The Red Shoes, and in our own hard times it is a joy to revisit it. Released in 1948 and produced, written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it draws its source from a fable by Hans Christian Andersen in which a vain and venal girl is given a pair of fine red shoes that she has long coveted: once she puts them on, however, she cannot stop dancing until they exhaust her to death.
Powell and Pressburger’s spin on this is the modern tale of an aspiring English ballerina Victoria Page (played by Moira Shearer, herself then a star at Covent Garden) who achieves her dream of joining a prestigious Russian ballet company and is then forced to choose between her glorious career and her love for a young composer. It’s a fascinating narrative with some haunting psychosexual undertones, redolent of the era when ballet was the most glamorous of art forms, and the film is brilliantly acted and scripted.
Yet it’s the extravagant visual spectacle, recorded by the legendary cameraman Jack Cardiff, that makes the film so compelling. Much of the film takes place in either gorgeously furnished interiors or the glowing sunlight of the Riviera, and there are several magnificent set pieces: who could ever forget the scene where Victoria, wearing a voluminous pink silk ball gown, slowly ascends the cypress-lined staircase towards the mysterious palace above Monte Carlo where the impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) holds court; or the astonishing 17-minute ballet at the film’s heart – a sequence of imaginative daring much imitated but still unsurpassed?
So original was the film’s concept that it received mixed reviews and initially proved slow to catch on with audiences. But it was an instant hit in the USA, winning two Oscars and five nominations, and soon became one of the biggest grossing, as well as one of the best-loved, British films ever made.