The Red Shoes

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger team up again for The Red Shoes (1948), a delightful, rapturous film. Despite the trite story and draggy pace, it's an extraordinary piece of work, with perhaps the most beautiful Technicolor cinematography ever. You will never see a more beautiful film, and for that reason alone it's watchable.

Arrogant ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) commissions a new ballet, based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes. He enlists Julian Craster (Marius Goring), an ambitious young composer, and dancer Victoria Paige (Moira Shearer) to help out. The show is a huge hit, and Victoria becomes a ballet superstar, but she is torn between her love for Julian and devotion to her career.

The Red Shoes shares a lot with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), not the least its ravishing appearance. Powell and Jack Cardiff create a masterpiece of photography: the Technicolor positively shines, with reds leaping off the screen in incredibly vivid contrasts, and even grays and browns takeon an impossibly beautiful hue. Complemented by Arthur Lawson's sumptuous, dream-like art direction - cramped theaters, huge mansions and hotels - the movie is impossibly beautiful.

We can add to the above virtues a fine, witty script by Powell, Pressburger and Keith Winter, vibrant costumes by Hein Heckroth, and an extraordinary score by Brian Easdale. There is not a single word to say against the film's technical qualities.

Many of Powell and Pressburger's films gleefully incorporate "magic realism" into mundane settings, but Red Shoes does it best. By far the best scene is the lengthy ballet sequence: starting out as a filmed performance, it builds into an extraordinary set-piece, with amazing choreography, shifting sets and visual sleight-of-hand (a paper man turning into a real dancer!), flaunting the story's unreality. This fifteen-minute sequence is absolutely jaw-dropping, pure cinematic fantasia, realism be damnded.

Unfortunately, The Red Shoes also shares with Colonel Blimp a deficiency in narrative. The story is fairly trite, a show-biz drama with a romantic triangle, but trite stories can be made grand. A bigger problem is the draggy pace; the film's story takes a long time to get going, and lingers a great deal afterwards, culminating in an unsatisfying, forced conclusion. Still, the gorgeous photography and dancing scenes dominate so much, that one can overlook problems in plotting.

Powell regular Anton Walbrook gives his usual solid performance, though he chews a bit of scenery in later segments. The luminous Moira Shearer gives a fine performance: her extraordinary dancing chops. Marius Goring is adequately stiff as Julian. The rest of the cast contributes nicely, mostly through their excellent dancing.

The Red Shoes has its shortcomings, but its reputation as one of the most attractive films ever shot is well-deserved.