I've cried in pain, at times, and I've shed tears of joy, but this may be the first film that has ever drawn tears for the sheer majesty of pure art. There's a portion of this film, roughly halfway through, that is a triumph of artistic collaboration such as one seldom encounters. Another extraordinary aspects of this film is how its themes extend through multiple layers, from the history behind the making of the film, to the Red Shoes ballet within the film, to the narrative of the film itself. Let's start with how the film came into existence.

Historical Background: The raw idea that would ultimately evolve into The Red Shoes, in 1948, began circulating during the 1930's as a possible biopic of the peerless male ballet performer, Vaslav Nijinsky (or Nizhinskii). Nijinsky had been one of the greats of the Ballets Russes, formed in 1909 by the famous impresario, Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872-1929). Diaghilev, who ranks among the greatest figures in the arts during the early decades of the twentieth century, revolutionized ballet, from its style of motion, to the music, to the scenic design. By his imposing personality, he brought together artists of the highest caliber in every production capacity, and integrated their work. He worked with the greatest choreographers of his era and commissioned ballet music from the likes of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Ottorino Respighi, and Francis Poulenc. His most important musical collaboration was with Igor Stravinsky; it was Diaghilev who launched Stravinsky's great series of ballets, including The Firebird (1910), Petruska (1911), The Rite of Spring (1913), famously precipitating a riot, Pulcinella (1920), and my personal favorite piece in all of classical music, Les Noces (1923). The relationship between Diaghilev and his principal dancers and protégés, such as Nijinsky and Léonide Massine, was that of harsh taskmaster to devoted young artists. Like the character Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes, Diaghilev demanded absolute focus and commitment from his star dancers and discouraged their involvement in romantic relationships. The marriages of Nizhinskii and Myasin led to heated conflicts with Diaghilev. When the idea of a film was floated in the 1930's, it was anticipated that Paul Muni might play the role of Nijinsky and Charles Laughton that of Diaghilev. Later, there was discussion at London Films, Alexander Korda's production company, of reviving the idea as a romance and a vehicle for Korda's wife, Merle Oberon (as actress, but not dancer).

War intervened, however, and, by the time it was over, Oberon had left Korda and two of Korda's protégés, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, had formed their own production company called "The Archers." Launched in 1942, The Archers would give birth to a string of innovative films that would stretch the creative boundaries of filmmaking. There was the daring The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), that had the sheer effrontery to satirize the British establishment even though war was proceeding at full throttle. Then, there was I Know Where I'm Going (1945), Stairway to Heaven (also called "A Matter of Life and Death") (1946), and Black Narcissus (1946), which introduced experiments in Technicolor and surrealism. Now the war was over, however, and Powell and Pressburger wanted something fresh and bright that could lift the pall that hung over postwar Britain. They returned to that idea, which Pressburger had first drafted back in the thirties, relating to the backstage life of a ballerina. They would fashion it as nothing less than a testament to The Arts and their ability to triumph over the gloom of everyday life. Their paean to The Arts would be a stunning integration of various arts traditions: dance, music, cinema, and even literature (in the form of an old children's fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson, The Red Shoes). For the focal character, Powell and Pressburger devised quite likely their most memorable persona, Boris Lermontov, styled after Diaghilev, but named for the Russian poet and author Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), one of the foremost voices of Russian romanticism. To lend authenticity to the associations with the old Ballets Russes, Léonide Massine himself, one of the Diaghilev protégés who married, was brought in to play the part of Grischa Ljubov, the choreographer and the Shoemaker in the ballet within the film.

The Story: The film opens with a mob of students very nearly busting down the door of a London theater where a ballet, Hearts of Fire, is about to be performed. Professor Palmer (Austin Trevor) is the composer of the music for the ballet and among the throng that rushes in are three of his adoring students, including Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Craster is shocked when he recognizes that some of the themes incorporated in the ballet were lifted from one of his student assignments. He writes an angry letter to the ballet impresario, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), accusing his professor of plagiarism.

Meanwhile, Lady Neston (Irene Browne), a generous patron of the arts, invites Lermontov to a post-performance party. Lermontov is reluctant to go but all the more so when he discovers the hostess's intent is to use her influence to obtain an informal audition for her ballet-dancing niece. Lermontov refuses flatly to watch the performance and soon finds himself grousing about the imposition to the person standing beside him at the wine table. As it turns out, she is that imposition, Lady Neston's niece, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer). In an effort to recover from his faux pas, Lermontov asks the young woman why she wants to dance. Victoria retorts, "Why do you want to live?" When he then answers, "I don't know exactly why . . . but I must!", she says, with assurance, "That's my answer, too." Lermotov is impressed and tells her to come around in the morning and join the ballet class.

The next morning while Lermotov is having his breakfast, Craster shows up wanting to recover the letter that he had written so impetuously. Lermotov has already read it, however, and suggests that such things (plagiarism) sometimes happen inadvertently. "Forget it," he suggests, "After all, it's better to be stolen from than to have to resort to stealing." Lermotov asks Craster to play some of his music on the piano and is impressed enough to offer the young man a job, on the spot, as rehearsal conductor. Thus, the Lermontov Ballet suddenly finds itself with two new aspiring talents on the same day.

Julian and Victoria each begin to rise in stature, in their respective domains. Victoria takes instruction from the lead male dancer of the company, Ivan Boleslawsky (Robert Helpmann), and the choreographer, Grischa Ljubov (Léonide Massine) and makes the cut for the company's European tour. Lermotov begins to take note of her talent and her presence. When his prima ballerina, Irina Boronskaja (Ludmilla Tchérina), announces her plan to marry, Lermotov immediately dismisses her. Lermotov believes that his lead dancers must be totally devoted to their art and that personal relationships only serve to distract that effort. The wheels start turning in Lermotov's mind. He asks Julian to rewrite some weak passages in a score, written by another composer, for a ballet to be called The Red Shoes. Julian's revisions are so much better than the original that Lermotov modifies the request, asking Julian to produce an entire new score, but Julian has done so already. Later, Victoria is shocked and pleased when she is informed that she is to be the lead dancer in this new production, provided that she's prepared to devote herself to relentless preparation.

Next the film illuminates the monumental effort that goes into launching a new production, not only for the dancers and choreographers, but also for the décor designer, Sergei Ratov (Albert Bassermann), the musicians, and the conductor. Julian and Victoria spend countless hours, sometimes arguing over tempo, he wanting precedence for the music and she for the dance, but gradually they become more accommodating and appreciative of one another. The film's highlight is the 15-20 minute performance of the resultant production, initially rendered as it might have been performed on stage, but gradually turning into a surreal integration of physical reality and Victoria's subjective experience. No longer bound by the usual limitations of time and space, the dancing now entails graceful gravity-defying leaps, dancing newspaper pages that morph into three-dimensional performers, and subconscious mental links between Victoria and the two men most central to her life, Julian and Boris.

The debut of The Red Shoes is a monumental success and Boris, Victoria, Julian, Grischa, Ivan and others all share in the afterglow. Lermontov's faith in Victoria's talent and drive has been vindicated and he announces a worldwide tour that will feature Victoria in all of the staples of the ballet repertoire, including Coppelia, La Boutique Fantastique, Les Sylphides, and Romeo and Juliet. Meanwhile, off-stage, Julian and Victoria are falling in love. They are now playing Romeo Craster and Juliette Page and Lermontov, of course, is the last to know. When he does learn of the affair, he is furious. He will not have his star distracted by a romance. He intentionally antagonizes Julian until the composer is forced to resign. As Julian departs, he comments, "Some of us consider ballet a second rate form of expression anyway." When Victoria learns of Julian's dismissal, she reluctantly makes the choice to leave with Julian, and the two are soon married back in London.

Love, it would seem, has triumphed. Well, not entirely a triumph, because back in London, Victoria finds very little work and nothing comparable to prima ballerina for the Lermontov Ballet. Julian's career, by contrast, shifts into overdrive. He's composing an opera that will soon receive its premiere performance. Boris, as he is wont to do, finds an opportunity to "accidentally" encounter Victoria, during a visit to her aunt. He wheedles and cajoles, but it is Victoria's own love of dancing that turns the tide, and she agrees to return for a revival of The Red Shoes. As luck would have it, her opening night coincides with that of Julian's opera. Julian, feeling betrayed and delirious with jealousy, skips the opening night of his opera to find Victoria and demand that she return with him to London. On her other side, Boris demands that she leave Julian so that she can devote herself to dancing, promising that he'll make her the greatest dancer ever if she does. Faced with an impossible choice, Victoria can only defer the decision elsewhere – to the red shoes. Dancing frenetically down a long set of stone steps, the shoes carry Victoria to her destiny.

Themes: The ballet within the film, based on the fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, involves a shoemaker who makes a magical pair of red ballet slippers that impart to their wearer the ability to dance continuously. Eventually, however, the ballerina who wears the slippers dances to her death, but the slippers survive, to await another owner. Victoria's first remark to Lermontov, that she dances because she must, is what induces him to offer her a chance. His firm belief is that an artist's devotion to his art must be absolute. Real art, according to Boris, requires pain and sublimation. An artist must sacrifice everything for art's sake.. Lermontov may be a martinet, but he's no hypocrite. Boris himself subordinates all personal feelings for the benefit of the company and its artistic product. Victoria is initially of that mind as well. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that her signature ballet should be one about a girl who dances herself to death for her art.

Then love comes into play. Unexpectedly, without intending to do so, Victoria and Julian find themselves in love with one another. Now she has a classic conflict of motivations: realizing her career potential or fulfillment in love. Victoria wants to continue her dancing but also wants to commit to a relationship with Julian. Unfortunately, for Victoria, the two options are mutually exclusive, especially because Boris won't accept anything less than Victoria's total commitment to her art. Victoria initially believes that she can work a compromise by pursuing a career locally. For the average artist, that might be all they could aspire to anyway. For a dancer of Victoria's potential, however, there is little satisfaction to be derived. It's relevant, here, that the character Lermontov was named after a poet associated with Russian romanticism. The Romance Period in literature glorified the arts as a sacred trust. Thus, the conflict developed in this film could be defined as Romance vs. romance, where the capitalized form represents devotion to Art and the lowercase form the more conventional interpersonal kind of romance.

To some extent, Victoria's dilemma is the classic feminist challenge for all talented women – having to choose between career and marriage/family. When both husband and wife in a marriage are high-powered professionals, it's often impossible for both to maximize their career opportunities in the same locale. The issue is not, however, entirely gender specific. The film Cinema Paradiso (the new version more than the old) examines the same issue of conflict between career and fulfillment in love, but for a male protagonist. Certainly, however, it's more frequently a challenge for women than men, in most societies. In my opinion, the best way to ensure that decisions about career vs. personal life are made wisely is to encourage each person to make their own decision, without undue pressure. Both Julian and Boris could have served Victoria best by backing off.

There's a fascinating paradox in relation to the question of selfishness and Victoria's dilemma. Boris asks nothing of Victoria for himself. He wants her to devote herself totally to her art. If she follows his guidance, she'll be adopting a kind of self-centered focus, guided by her career aspirations. Julian, by contrast, is selfishly asking Victoria to sacrifice her own ambitions, for the benefit of his career and their marriage. If she does, she'll be acting selflessly.

In addition to the foregoing feminist aspect to this film, there's also a subliminal gay theme, though it's never directly articulated. Diaghilev was gay and widely known to be. Anton Walbrook, who plays the part of Lermontov, was a gay actor. In addition to its other virtues, The Red Shoes is commendable for presenting a gay character played by an openly gay actor at a time when such was not often the case. More importantly, the character is one who is strong, talented, and confident and no special reference is made to his sexual orientation. The fact that Lermontov is gay has an odd kind of effect on the quality of the film's themes because it diminishes the possibility that Lermontov's motivations in relation to Victoria (and Irina before her) had to do with jealousy or a competing romantic interest. Lermontov's implied sexual orientation ensures that the conflict is between Art and Love, and not a conventional love triangle.

One of the intents at The Archers in making this film was to reassert the importance of the arts in human life. Powell would later say, "For ten years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art." In a pragmatic and pecuniary world in which The Arts are constantly being asked to justify themselves, The Red Shoes reflects on The Arts as a sacred calling and the apogee of human existence.

One last theme I'll mention is the unspoken tension among the various arts. The production of this film involved a lot of clashes of egos as people from various arts came together to produce a difficult kind of synthesis. That same dynamic conflict is seen in the film as the various members of Lermontov's company pull together, and sometimes in opposing directions, to create a new production. The film's opening sequence introduced the competitive aspect of the relationship between the various arts. Craster and his friends are there to hear the music and care little about the dancers. Next to them are two people who are just dying to see the prima ballerina, Boronskaja, but who care little about the music. Later, Craster tries to get Victoria to adjust her dancing to his music's tempo while she wants him to adjust the music's tempo to her dancing. Still later, Craster makes his comment about ballet being a second-rate form of expression. People in The Arts may complain about getting too little respect from society as a whole, but sometimes they don't respect one another very much, either.

Production Values: The credits for this film state that it was based on a fable of Hans Christian Andersen, but it's really only the ballet within the film that has a direct relationship to the fable. The ballet also has echoes of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which was commissioned by Diaghilev), where a dancer dances herself to death. The rest of the film is related to the fable only to the extent that themes cross over from the ballet to the backstage drama. The film is also based in large part on the real life intrigues within the famous Ballets Russes, as described in the Historical Background section, above. There's little question that Lermontov is a stand-in for Diaghilev. The film's core is the impresario/dancer relationship and the ballet's core is the fable, but what's particularly special about this film is the way that themes cross over between the two. Lermontov, for example, can be seen as the Shoemaker in the ballet, who only wants the dancer to dance until she drops and cares nothing for her as a person, separate from her art. The backstage drama is presented in the style of realism while the lengthy and stunningly effective ballet production ultimately extends into surrealism. The Red Shoes borrows a technique that was first employed in Children of Paradise (1945), in which the action proceeds simultaneously on three planes: the show, the backstage activity, and the real lives and feelings of the performers. If the script has a weakness, it's only that the highlight and centerpiece of the film comes at the midpoint, making the last hour or so somewhat anticlimactic in comparison. It's not that the last hour is below standard but just that the ballet sequence sets an exceptionally lofty standard that could not be maintained throughout.

The cinematography and special effects used for the ballet sequence reminded me a bit of what Zhang Yimou has been introducing in his recent films, such as Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004). That I even suggest as much is pretty amazing for a film made in 1948, long before computer-generated graphics. The costumes and the sets are excellent throughout this film, but especially for the ballet. The dancing, the choreography, and the music are all beautiful to behold. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff was a big part of the success of The Archers. He mastered the potentials of the new Technicolor film faster than just about anyone else in the business and opened the industry's eyes to what could be done with it. His use of color, light, and shadow is exemplary. He also supervised the digital transfer. Composer Brian Easdale provided a very fine score for the ballet, as well as the film, working within the classical tradition, but incorporating twentieth-century jazz influences as well.

The cast is outstanding, especially considering that several of the leads were dancers with little or no film experience before this outing. That was the case for Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine, Robert Helpmann, and Ludmilla Tchérina, exactly half of the eight top-billed performers. They held their own with the experienced actors, even within the acting domain. The beautiful, red-headed Moira Shearer was a ballerina, at the time, with the Sadler's Wells Company. She later appeared in Peeping Tom (1960), though I hate to mention it. Anton Walbrook and Marius Goring were regulars in films produced by The Archers. Walbrook's other work included Victoria the Great (1937), Gaslight (1940), 49th Parallel (1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), La Ronde (1950), and Lola Montès (1955). Goring also worked in Stairway to Heaven (1946).

Bottom-Line: The Criterion DVD has a very nice package of extras. You'll find an audio commentary with film historian Ian Christie (as well as a short essay in the cover booklet by him), an animated short called The Red Shoes Sketches based on Hein Heckroth's painted storyboards, excerpts from the Andersen fable and a novel version of the film written by Powell and Pressburger and read by Jeremy Irons, production stills, a trailer, and optional English subtitles for the hearing impaired.

After my mostly negative review of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, yesterday, I wanted to give the guy another chance as quickly as possible. The result was a kind of rags to riches transition. This is quite simply one of the finest films I've ever seen. It's not primarily intended for ballet aficionados. I've seen only a handful of ballets (though I've listened to sound recordings of many). My understanding and appreciation for the dance aspect of ballet is no better than average, but it's not a prerequisite for enjoyment of this film. If you haven't already caught this film, you've missed out on a great one. Check it out!

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12