Simply red? The Red Shoes (1948), BFI, 100 Greatest Films

You have to take that film with a huge tin of salt, because there was never a ballet company anywhere which was like that. I'm sure no dancer of any generation ever had this supposedly appalling problem ending in suicide, if you please - between real life and the ballet.

Moira Shearer*

 

What is there to say about this film that hasn’t already been said? Something you could say for pretty much the rest of the Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films the BFI are showing across January and February, a once a decade opportunity to re-explore the cannon as reinvented or reinforced by some 1600 film critics (almost as many Tory Party members it takes to elect a new leader...). Powell and Pressburger have to be in there and it’s impossible to rank their films although clearly, the electorate have…

I watched the screening at the BFI and then watched it again with wife, daughter and mother-in-law who remembered her impressions on seeing it on screen in 1948 when she was just 16. Two different audiences and it was fascinating to compare over the day. I’m not sure how many of the packed audience watching on NFT 3 had previously seen the film but, after a chatty disturbed start with some early laughs at the quaintness of the dialogue we settled down in silence as the film engaged minds and sensibilities.

It's hard not to become engrossed in this film as Powell and Pressburger create such an intense atmosphere with dialogue from the latter that challenges our norms of polite discourse. Anton Walbrook’s Boris Lermontov manages to be extraordinarily rude, maniacally controlling and also strangely vulnerable. He carries natural authority and with trademark restraint manages to underplay a role that could so easily fall flat through an excess of grim single-mindedness. Boris just needs to find beauty in his art and even the prospect of being danced to in the inappropriate surroundings of an after-show party is too much for him to bear. He reminds me so much of Jose Mourinho.

Lermontov is not the only jarring character; even Moira Shearer’s Vicky Page is frank and awkwardly single minded, first in the way she talks back to Boris after he disapproves of her being asked to “audition” for him at an after show party and then as she insists on greeting him personally on stage during her first day at the ballet, she’s young but she’s strong. Walbrook may well give a star turn but in Shearer’s cinematic debut she is the centre piece, the star who is to be born and the focus not only our attention but also admiration; she is a ballerina acting the role of a ballerina and her dancing is not something you can “act”.

Powell had seen Shearer performing with the Sadlers Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) aged 20 and had pursued her for his film for something like a year. The dancer herself was less than impressed with the idea especially as she saw the story as a bit daft. She was on her way up, dancing in the shadow of Margot Fontaine and about to get her first prima roles, how could this film help her with her ambition?

Powell eventually got his woman but only after he hired a group of leading ballet dancers to form the core cast and after the Royal Ballet said that Shearer would be welcomed back after the filming. After she came back she felt the film didn’t help her in what was already a highly competitive corps de ballet but, interestingly, her stature increased as she continued to develop technically and to be offered not only the classic leading roles but also a ballet written especially for her, created by the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton. She danced the title role in the premiere of his Cinderella in 1948 having already ed his seminal neoclassical ballet Symphonic Variations in 1946, along with and along with Pamela May and Fonteyn.

Anton encourages

She soon found that filming ballet is quite different from performing on stage, and this was not all to her taste. Firstly there were the stages which had concrete floors, “… death to the calf muscles!”, then there was the disjointed nature of filming and “…the long waiting while cameras, lights, playbacks, etc, were organised. Eventually they would be ready and expect us to leap instantly into the air, but we were now cold and had to limber up yet again. No - filming ballet is not easy.” Quoting a lecture she gave in 1949, The Daily Express had her complaining The chopped-up sequences allowing perhaps only half a minute's dancing at a time made it very difficult and a very miserable experience. You can see how the film-making experience would have been completely counter to her ingrained discipline and practice. And yet, she made it.

Another deciding factor in her decision to do so was the casting of Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina, three ballet dancers with impressive pedigrees. Shearer had worked with Helpmann and Massine a number of times and also with several of the corps de ballet dancers and this familiarity shows in certain moments when they practice, rehearse and put in the hours with professional commitment. All of this makes the film stronger and the reality of the dance sustains the fantasy all around.

I had been a more rounded performer at the time I made it or that I would have done it two or three years later, when I think I would have done justice to it. Still, I've seen 'The Red Shoes' a couple of times in the past 10 years, and I must say that for all the creakiness of the dialogue and situations, it has a certain period charm… Moira Shearer, The New York Times, 1988

Powell had cast a young ballerina on the way up as, a young ballerina on the way up… he also cast the most extraordinary cinematic hair… Jack Cardiff’s cinematography is stratospherically good as usual but he achieves so much in being able to capture the natural tone of the actor’s golden strands as well as her Scottish freckles and powerful pale skin. These observations are made after a comparison of said tones with those of my wife Catherine, a Grade 6 ballerina in her day and no less fierce than Ms Shearer in her opinion and drive!

Powell may well have been cold, but Pressburger was not and the cast and crew created something far greater than the sum of the parts… despite himself, in Moira’s view he was cold, lacking warmth and humanity, and yet the director led in this wonderful cinematic creation with his crew excelling from painter Hein Heckroth, completely out of his comfort zone and yet providing astonishing production design along with costumes, and Arthur Lewis art direction. As with the gaggle of real dancers on set, the real filmmakers gelled and teamworked a gem.

It's tempting to draw a line from the film to Shearer’s eventual career choices but she really does sound like a no nonsense lass from Dumfries … the offers continued for years, including unlikely ones like El Cid with Charlton Heston. But I've always found my marriage and my children infinitely more important than any career, so no great decision had to be made…

Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer

No red shoes were to compel Moira away from the path she had chosen. That’s the reality but there is still so much to unpick from the fantasy. Red Shoes remains one of the greatest cult films of all time and part of that, a big part, is because of the sheer skill and humanity that Shearer bought to the film. She was to dance for Powell twice more, once in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and with a light-hearted cameo in the otherwise sinister Peeping Tom (1960) but she had four children by then and had found a different life.

Red Shoes is such an enduring fable, dramatizing the choices we make in life and its darker corners are mysterious enough to reward repeated viewing. Although, each time, I’m not the one who has to watch myself dance, but, in many ways, that is the heart of the film’s meaning even if, from the start, the star herself had such mixed feelings.

Let’s leave it to The Daily Express to add some of it’s now famed balance to Moira’s view of her film  with Emeric Pressburger responding to comments she made in 1949, I will make no comment. Miss Shearer has the right to criticise like everyone else. I don't know why she is doing it. But she must have a reason.

So much to unpick and I look forward to Pamela Hutchinson’s book on The Red Shoes being published later this years. There’s so much more to learn for a film that never grows old and wins over every new generation.

You can pre-order the book now direct from Bloomsbury, there will be more opportunities to see and discuss this film as the year unfolds.

*From a 1994 interview reproduced in An Autobiography of British Cinema, Brian McFarlane (1997), Methuen/BFI (pp 532-5)

**Quotes sourced from the excellent Powell and PressburgerPages site. 

Léonide Massine offers you a choice...