Red Shoes [VHS] [1948]

How to explain magic? Some movies have it but most don't. When I first saw this film long ago at the Hamilton Theater on the South Side of Chicago, I felt its enchantment almost from the first scene until the tragic conclusion. Frankly, at that age, I really didn't fully understand (much less appreciate) what I had just seen but I knew it was something quite special. And so it remains decades later. To some extent based on one of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, this film examines the brief and tragic career of a young ballerina, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), who becomes an international celebrity following her performance of The Red Shoes while a member of the Lermontov Ballet Company. Shearer's performance is most credible when she dances, of course, but at least adequate when delivering her lines. The strongest performances are those of Marius Goring (Craster) and Anton Walbrook (Lermontov) who portray men in love with the same woman. The plot is really insignificant to the music and especially to the dancing. I also enjoy the exterior shots in London and Paris in the late-1940s. For me, the 15-minute ballet sequence is among the most enjoyable audiovisual experiences on film and was perhaps an inspiration for the extended dream sequence in An American in Paris three years later.

One final comment. Perhaps I have been spoiled by the quality of other DVDs (sound/image quality and/or special features) but nonetheless share the disappointment of others with the production quality of this DVD. The glitches are minor but a distraction.

This is a magnificent movie, one of the most voluptuous ever filmed (in Technicolor), one of the most influential, and one of the most satisfyingly melodramatic. Every bit of it works. At the most simplistic, it's a fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, that takes place in a ballet, which is repeated in real life.

At the heart of the movie is Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), the imperious impresario of The Ballet Lermontov. He can be cold, charming, ruthless. At a party he says, "If some fat harriden is going to sing, I must go. I can't stand amateurs." He's enigmatic except for his dedication to ballet. At that same party he meets Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a young ballet dancer, and is intrigued by her.

"Why do you want to dance?" he asks her.

"Why do you want to live?"

"I don't know exactly why, but I must," he says.

"That's my answer, too."

He brings her into his ballet company and also hires Julian Craster, a young composer. Later, with three weeks to create a ballet, he has Craster compose the music to the story of The Red Shoes. Victoria Page will dance it. It is a triumph, but Page leaves the Ballet Lermontov to marry Craster. Lermontov is outraged and swears he'll never see her again. She needs to dance, though, and Lermontov slowly realizes he wants her back, completely dedicated to dancing, because he can make her a great dancer. He subtly woos her back to dance the ballet again, with tragic results.

The ballet of the red shoes is the story of a young girl, engaged to be married who loves to dance and longs to go the village fair. She spies a pair of red dancing shoes in the window of a shoemaker. Despite the reluctance of her fiance, she dons the shoes and begins to dance. She has a joyous time. As she tires, however, the shoes won't let her stop dancing and she can't take them off. She dances until she dies.

The movie works so well on so many levels. Anton Walbrook is marvelous. He can be cold and demanding and devious as Lermontov, but he conveys exactly Lermontov's utter dedication. At the end of the movie when Lermontov, alone on the stage, announces to the audience Victoria Page's death in a strangled kind of breaking screech...well, you'll sit up straight. Moira Shearer, who was in fact a young ballet dancer at Sadlers' Wells and had to be coaxed to take the role, is a gorgeous creature and a first-rate dancer. She carries off the acting requirements very well. With her flaming red hair, she is just a wonder to look at and appreciate.

And then there is The Red Shoes Ballet itself. This was the first time a movie's story line was interrupted for an extended dance piece. The music by Brian Easdale is so memorable that I doubt anyone who hears it will forget the main theme. Powell directed the ballet as a surreal fantasy. It starts on the stage of the theater, then shifts to a stage that was never built in a real theater, then shifts into pure cinema. After The Red Shoes, other musicals suddenly had to have ballets -- An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, and on and on -- but none has ever been better than this.

The Red Shoes is a magnificent movie. It deservedly remains one of Powell's and Pressburger's great accomplishments.

This extraordinary movie has been watched all over the world throughout the sixty years since it was made. Probably no day passes without it being shown somewhere in the world. I doubt these statements are true of any other movie except, perhaps, 'Casablanca'. Moreover, many of the people that love it don't particularly like ballet. Some actively dislike classical ballet. How can this be?

It is so successful because the director pulls so many of the arts together in one construct, each and all of them to an unsurpassed standard. Dancers, musicians, composers, choreographers, actors, painters, stage designers, cinematographers, lighting designers, studio technicians - even producers! - all gave of their transcendental best to tell a universally well-loved, traditional folk-tale interpreted by one of the greatest storytellers ever, and to tell it as a ten-hankie love story.

Two artists in particular should be noted, as they often get left out, upstaged by the more obvious talents of Walbrook, Shearer and Massine, who each grab your attention whenever they are on screen.

First, and perhaps greatest of the lot, Jack Cardiff for his brilliant, innovative camera-work and Technicolor photography, especially because these were the early days of Technicolor and he, a hitherto unknown Brit cameraman, introduced, for the first time, a painterly eye which amazed the American Technicolor specialists. His extraordinary and innovative camerawork for the ballet within the film has never been equalled.

Second, Brian Easdale's music rarely gets proper credit, probably because the Red Shoes' sprightly theme is lifted directly from Elgar's 1901 'Cockaigne' overture. The music is no worse for that, as Easdale creates his own evocative variations with brilliant development and orchestration, precisely reflecting the style typical of contemporary ballet music in the first half of the 20th century. Exciting, emotional, highly rhythmic, eminently danceable ballet music, perfectly interpreting the subject.

Moira Shearer (a dancer at the peak of her powers on the classical ballet stage at the time) was famed for the unrivalled precision of her dancing. She not only entrances us with her talent and gorgeous combination of red hair and creamy skin, but, at a (much) lower level, reduced males to blubber with the shot of her pert bottom in little dance shorts as she walked towards the exercise barre. Wow!

Ignore the Amazon review - it is disgracefully irrelevant to this iconic movie. This is certainly the best movie about ballet ever made and by any standard one of the best movies of all time. Even if you do not like ballet, you must see it once. If you like ballet, you will see it many times.

I saw Red Shoes when it first came out in 1948, when I was a boy of sixteen and head-over-heels in love with my own real-life, beautiful ballet dancer!! Which is, of course, why I have seen it several times a year ever since, will continue to watch it until I make my own final exit, stage right, and will never accept any criticism of it whatsoever. Of course this movie is over the top - this is ART, for Heaven's sake! And that driven bastard Lermontov is, unfortunately, only too right. As he says in the movie - "NOTHING..matters..but..the..music." As I was to learn the hard way, human emotions ARE transitory, while art lives for ever. The human drama of how this plays out in the movie is what makes it a great film as well as the best ever film about ballet.

No real art gets made without enormous sacrifice. Ever