OVP: The Red Shoes (1948)

Film: The Red Shoes (1948)
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Leonide Massine
Directors: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Oscar History: 5 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Score*, Art Direction*, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

It is not often I get to fill in a famous gap in my Oscar viewing, a film that is spoken about in not only hushed tones it's so revered, but one that was nominated for a lot of Oscars, including our theme this week, Best Film Editing.  That's the case today, though, as I finally watch The Red Shoes, the supposed peak of Powell & Pressburger's cinematic collaborations (additional confession time-I've never seen Black Narcissus so I can't really confirm if this is the true peak).  The movie, somewhat controversial in its day for its depictions of the ballet (the reviews were polarizing at the time), still managed five Oscar nominations & made an enormous sum of money (it was the most successful British film of all-time for a while), and has since been hailed as a landmark of the era.  But as I knew very little of the film other than seeing (gorgeous) still shots of it, I was curious what it'd actually be like, and as you can tell by the star-ranking, I left mesmerized.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in three acts.  The first is the story of three figures discovering one another: Vicky Page (Shearer), a beautiful young dancer who dreams of performing in the Lermontov Ballet company, run by the ambitious & cruel Boris Lermontov (Walbrook), and Julian Craster (Goring), a brilliant young composer whose professor has lifted his work for a Lermontov ballet, and seemingly to convince him to stay quiet, Lermontov gives him a job in his orchestra.  Both rise up in the ranks of the Lermontov company, despite Lermontov's harshness to them whenever they slip or slightly fail, and are given the opportunity to create "The Red Shoes," based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale.  This leads to the second chapter of the movie, a 17-minute ballet sequence that shows Shearer flawlessly recreating the fictional ballet, without interruption for cutaways.  In the final act of the film, we find that Julian & Vicky are lovers, and intend to get married, and the implication is this will cause Vicky to leave the ballet, or not be devoted enough to it.  This is unacceptable to Lermontov, who continually throws roadblocks in the way of their relationship in his pursuit to "own" Vicky.  In the end, neither man gets what they want.  Vicky returns to the ballet, against Julian's wishes, but in the last moments of the film is driven mad (or is perhaps truly possessed by the red shoes), and cannot stop dancing, eventually throwing herself in front of a train, killing herself (or possibly being murdered by the Red Shoes), while the dancers in her company recreate a sad ballet without their leading lady, upon Lermontov's insistence.

There are a lot of ways to go with The Red Shoes, but I'm going to start with its focus on obsession.  The film's main characters all want contradictory things.  Julian wants to be a great composer, but he also wants a traditional wife & family, which he's never going to get from a woman who loves him, but loves dancing & her ambition more.  That ambition is what drives Lermontov to be obsessed with Vicky, seeing in her a potential kindred spirit, but his lack of humanity makes it impossible for him to give Vicky the love she wants in addition to the dancing career she desires.  This all leads back, of course, to the metaphor of the Red Shoes, as they represent that our obsessions come with a price. The ballerina in the center of the film just wants to dance in a way that no one else can, and she does, but the price is her life, just like what the shoes eventually cost Vicky.  Older films of this time didn't take women's professional lives seriously (a woman playing an actor or singer in a romance is expected, in the end, to give up her professional dreams to be happy at home with her husband), but what's really revolutionary in my read of this film decades later is that Vicky's obsession is a choice, and it's the men in her life forcing her to "pick them" rather than picking what she wants that ultimately causes her demise.  It isn't dancing that causes her tragedy-it's the men forcing her to dance on their terms, rather than her own.

This is a pretty apparent in the film-The Red Shoes is remarkable for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest is that it's not an "interpret this by modern standards" sort of movie, where you have to adjust the curve a lot to call some of the psychological insight out in the film.  The Red Shoes isn't modern (in the sense that movies like this were never popular in any era), but it's remarkable in the care it brings to the screen, and feels like simply a cinematic anomaly like 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Passion of Joan of Arc; it's a movie that tries to approach conventional filmmaking in a new way, and succeeds breathlessly.  The movie is gorgeous to behold-there's not a frame in the film that doesn't feel rich with light, energy, and passion (how the hell this didn't get nominated for Best Cinematography is a mystery on par with Humphrey Bogart not getting in for Treasure of the Sierra Madre...what was the Academy thinking in 1948?), and it fills me with awe that this wasn't just an eventually discovered gem, but instead a genuine hit in its day (it was the highest-grossing film of 1948, out-earning even Red River and Johnny Belinda).  The acting is terrific & unconventional, which is probably why it wasn't nominated for any performance awards (though Shearer & Walbrook would've made the cut for me).

The film's editing is succinct and specific, oftentimes with quick cuts as if to impress the passage of time, or to show signs of the impending madness, and as a result this is the best-edited of any of the movies we've seen so far this week.  The Art Direction is colorful & imaginative, particularly as we see crosscutting between reality & the stage sets during the performance of The Red Shoes, and the score magnificent.  Today we'd assume that the score was based on some classic music by Tchaikovsky or Wagner to give it a steep of history (and as an insurance policy if the critics don't think it lives up to the claims in the film that it's "revolutionary"), but this movie doesn't do that.  Instead, Brian Easdale composed an entire score & ballet for the film, and it feels as if we're witnessing a true new classic.  Easdale made history as a result, becoming the first British composer to win an Academy Award.  This win, as well as The Red Shoes strange place in box office, Oscar, and film history, proves how special The Red Shoes was and still is in its place in the cinematic firmament.