The Red Shoes is a 1948 British dance drama film written, produced and directed by the duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It follows Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), an aspiring ballerina who joins the world-renowned Ballet Lermontov, owned and operated by Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who tests her dedication to ballet by making her choose between her career and her romance with composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). It marked the feature film debut of Shearer, an established ballerina, and also features Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, and Ludmilla Tchérina, other renowned dancers from the ballet world. The metafictional plot is based on the 1845 fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, and features a ballet within it by the same title, also adapted from the Andersen work.
The Red Shoes was filmmaking team Powell and Pressburger's tenth collaboration and follow-up to 1947's Black Narcissus. It had been conceived by Powell and producer Alexander Korda in the 1930s, from whom the duo purchased the rights in 1946. Most of the cast were professional dancers. Filming of The Red Shoes took place in mid-1946, primarily in France and England.
Upon release, The Red Shoes received critical acclaim, especially in the United States, where it received a total of five Academy Award nominations, including a win for Best Original Score and Best Art Direction. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score and was named one of the Top 10 Films of the Year by the National Board of Review. Despite this, some dance critics gave the film unfavourable reviews as they felt its fantastical, impressionistic centrepiece sequence, influenced by German expressionist cinema of the 1920s, depicted ballet in an unrealistic manner. The film proved a major financial success and was the first British film in history to gross over $5 million in theatrical rentals in the United States.
Retrospectively, The Red Shoes is regarded as one of the best films of Powell and Pressburger's partnership and one of the greatest films of all time. It was voted the ninth greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute in 1999. The film underwent an extensive digital restoration beginning in 2006 at the UCLA Film and Television Archive to correct significant damage to the original negatives. The restored version of the film screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and was subsequently issued on Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection. In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics for Time Out magazine saw it ranked the fifth best British film ever.
Plot London music student Julian Craster attends a performance of the ballet Heart of Fire, performed by the eminent travelling ballet company Ballet Lermontov and scored by his professor. Also present are young dancer Victoria 'Vicky' Page and her aunt Lady Neston. Julian furiously walks out after recognising that the professor has plagiarised his compositions.
Lady Neston hosts an after-party in honour of the Ballet Lermontov's impresario, Boris Lermontov. After Vicky tells Boris that dancing is the most important thing in her life, Boris invites her to spend time with his ballet before it leaves for Paris. He hires Vicky full-time after watching her dance the lead in Swan Lake with Ballet Rambert at the Mercury Theatre.
Julian angrily writes a letter to Boris exposing his professor's misconduct. He has a change of heart and visits Boris to take the letter back, but Boris has already read it and is sympathetic. Boris hires Julian as a répétiteur and assistant to the company's conductor. He soon grows impressed with Julian's artistic ambition.
In Paris, Ballet Lermontov's principal dancer Irina Boronskaya is required to leave the company upon getting married, per company policy. Although Boris's official rationale is that love distracts from artistic excellence, the film also reveals that he takes his coworkers' emotional lives (which he lacks) as a personal slight, due to his jealousy of their happiness.
The company proceeds to Monaco. In Irina's absence, Boris casts Vicky as the lead in a new ballet, The Ballet of the Red Shoes (based on the Andersen fairytale), and hires Julian to score it. In the ballet, a dancer acquires a pair of red ballet shoes which enable her to dance with superhuman skill, but at a price: she can never stop dancing until she dies. During rehearsals, Julian and Vicky's ambition and pride lead them to clash at first—to Boris's glee. However, they develop respect for each other as artists.
The Ballet of the Red Shoes is a resounding success. Boris revitalises the company's repertoire with Vicky as the prima ballerina and Julian as the star composer. In the meantime, Vicky and Julian fall in love. Although Boris is not romantically attracted to Vicky, he is emotionally possessive of his new star. He tries to break up the relationship by telling them that their work is getting worse, but it is implied that he is projecting his own insecurities onto the relationship, as Boris's choreographer is full of praise for Julian. Boris gives Julian an ultimatum to break up with Vicky or leave the company. Julian and Vicky move back to London together and get married. Boris breaks his no-marriage rule to rehire Irina, but cannot mentally let go of Vicky.
In London, Vicky and Julian's careers go in different directions. Julian writes an opera that is set to open in Covent Garden, while Vicky's ballet career stalls. Vicky goes on holiday to Cannes without Julian, who is focused on his work. Boris meets her there. He reminds Vicky that she is the one making all the sacrifices in her marriage, and persuades her to "put on the red shoes again".
Coincidentally, the opening night of Julian's opera in London falls on the same date as Vicky's comeback performance in Monaco. Although Julian is supposed to conduct on opening night, he abruptly leaves for Monaco as a grand gesture for Vicky. In return, he insists that Vicky cancel her performance and leave Monaco and Boris immediately. After Julian and Boris have a heated argument about the value of art versus love, an anguished Vicky chooses to stay with Ballet Lermontov.
An attendant escorts Vicky to the stage. She is wearing the red shoes, and looks faint. She suddenly runs off and jumps in front of an oncoming train, paralleling her ill-fated character in the ballet. Julian tries to save her, but cannot. As Vicky dies, she asks Julian to remove the red shoes.
A shaken Boris announces to the audience that "Miss Page is unable to dance tonight—nor indeed any other night". The company performs The Ballet of the Red Shoes with a spotlight on the empty space where Vicky would have been.
Cast
Themes and analysis "Art versus life" A central theme to The Red Shoes is a performer's conflict between their art and personal life. Commenting on this theme, Powell himself stated that the film is "about dying for art, that art is worth dying for." Film scholar Adrienne McLean, however, notes that Victoria's final leap to her death does not adequately represent this idea. Rather, McLean states that Victoria "seems pushed by those she loves who would rather possess her than support her," and that the film ultimately illustrates the impact that "ruthless personalities" can have on "the weaker or more demure."
Scholar Peter Fraser, in Cinema Journal, observes of this tension between art and life that the film implodes its own "narrative and lyrical worlds... from the moment of recognition, when Vicky looks down at her red shoes and knows that she is then her lyrical persona, her two worlds collapse." He further states that the interpenetration of the lyrical upon the narrative "alters the meaning of the fiction" itself. This blurring of the lyrical and the narrative is represented at the end of the film, when Vicky jumps onto the train tracks; she is wearing the red shoes which she wore while preparing in her dressing room, despite the fact that in the performance her character does not put them on until part way through the ballet. Powell and Pressburger themselves discussed this idiosyncrasy and it has been subject to significant critical analysis since. Powell decided that it was artistically "right" for Vicky to be wearing the red shoes at that point because if she is not wearing them, it takes away the ambiguity over why she died.
The Ballet of the Red Shoes
The Red Shoes is famous for featuring a 17-minute ballet sequence (of a ballet entitled The Ballet of the Red Shoes) as its centrepiece. The sequence uses a variety of filmic techniques to provide an "impressionistic link" to the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale on which it (and the ballet within the film) is based, as well as the personal struggles faced by the protagonist, Victoria Page, who is dancing the lead role. McLean notes that the ballet not only duplicates Victoria's own story, but also foreshadows her love for Julian, the composer and conductor in the ballet's orchestra, as well as the contemptuous jealousy of Lermontov, its director.
Throughout the ballet, visual metaphors and fantastical references to Victoria's own life come alive on the screen, including a portion in which she dances with a floating newspaper that alternates in form between mere paper and the human form of Helpmann's character; this is referential to a windblown newspaper that Victoria previously stepped on the night she discovered she had acquired the lead role in the ballet.
Unlike in conventional filmed theatrical ballet, the ballet sequence in The Red Shoes is not one continuous, static shot, but instead employs a variety of editing techniques, close-ups, and special effects. As the ballet progresses, McLean notes that the action of the sequence "rockets from stage right to stage left, a series of swiftly performed vignettes alternating with garishly decorated set pieces. Then, as Robert Helpmann, playing the girl's lover, is borne away into the distance by a crowd, leaving the girl alone in her cursed red shoes, the action reverses... into and through the ballerina's subconscious mind." Because of its dynamic nature and excessive use of cinematic techniques, McLean contests that the ballet sequence is a "greater, or more characteristic, film experience than a dance one."
Genre classification The question of genre in relationship of The Red Shoes has been a recurrent preoccupation of both critics and scholars, as it does not neatly fit within the confines of a single genre. While the film's extended ballet sequences led some to characterise the film as a musical, McLean notes that the "conventional signals that had allowed fantasy elements to occur in other [musical] films are missing in The Red Shoes." Fraser contests that the film is not emblematic of the standard musical as it has a tragic and violent resolution, and that it is best understood as a "prototype of a generic variation" emerging from the musical film tradition.
The 21st-century critic Peter Bradshaw identifies elements of horror cinema in the film, particularly in its central, surreal ballet sequence, which he likens to "the surface of Lewis Carroll's looking-glass, through which the viewer is transported into a new world of amazement and occult horror."
Production Screenplay Producer Alexander Korda had conceived a ballet-themed film in 1934, which he intended to be a biopic about Vaslav Nijinsky. The project never came to fruition, but in 1937, Korda found himself again inspired to write a ballet-themed film as a vehicle for Merle Oberon, his future wife. Korda, along with filmmaker Michael Powell, fashioned a film based on Oberon's looks, but, because she was not a skilled dancer, Korda knew he would need to use a double for any dance sequences. Korda eventually abandoned the project, instead shifting his focus to The Thief of Bagdad (1940).