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Dance
Love and Dance: Two Obsessions, One
Classic Film
SIXTY years ago next week the Powell and Pressburger film “The Red Shoes”
opened to admiring reviews in its native Britain without causing any immediate
box office sensation. Nobody guessed that it would become one of the
highest-earning British movies of all time. Why would they? This is a film about
ballet as obsession, and it ends not in its heroine’s glory but in her
death.
It often looks as though it will turn into something much more conventional.
Later ballet films and many ballet novels have told their versions of the
standard story of a woman’s choice: career success or married love. In “The
Turning Point” (the hit ballet movie of 1977) Anne
Bancroft and Shirley
MacLaine represent those two choices, 20 years after they’ve made them. This
polarity was the stuff of so many women’s movies of the 1930s and ’40s, just now
shifted to ballet: Bancroft is the famous ballerina, Ms. MacLaine the fulfilled
wife and mother. And the film’s clichés only begin there.
The same choice permeates “The Red Shoes,” but it is presented to the
aspiring ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) at a melodramatically high
pitch. Within the film’s first hour Lermontov (Anton Wallbrook), the boss of
what is evidently the world’s greatest international ballet company, has
snarlingly announced: “You cannot have it both ways. The dancer who relies on
the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer. Never!”
Victoria, or Vicky, in full makeup and about to go on stage in the corps de
ballet of “Giselle,” hears his words. Indeed they seem aimed at her ears.
Lermontov, the embodiment of the possessive impresario, was based on Serge
Diaghilev, who had fired his two greatest male stars, Vaslav
Nijinsky (in 1913) and Léonide Massine (in 1921), because they had been his
lovers but switched tracks to marry women without his consent. The relationship
Lermontov has with his dancers also anticipates those that George
Balanchine would have with Suzanne
Farrell and her husband, Paul Mejia. The complications of that triangle
reached their climax in 1969, when the two dancers, amid intense pressure about
his casting decisions, suddenly quit New
York City Ballet.
Only when “The Red Shoes” reached America did it take off, converting
unnumbered thousands of girls to ballet. It had a direct effect on the colossal
success, in 1949, of the first American tour of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the
British ballet company that included the film’s heroine, the red-headed Shearer,
and one of its dancer-choreographers, the intensely theatrical Robert Helpmann.
The success of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet — in which Margot Fonteyn enjoyed a
triumph above and beyond those of Shearer and Helpmann, and which went on to
make extensive tours of North America, at least once every two years until 1976
— helped the popularity of other companies. Balanchine’s young New York City
Ballet in particular profited. Ballet, thanks in large part to “The Red Shoes,”
snowballed.
One of those girls whom “The Red Shoes” converted to ballet was the
9-year-old Lynn Springbett, growing up in Vancouver. She became Lynn Seymour,
the supreme dramatic ballerina of the last half of the 20th century and the most
remarkably original dancer in the history of the Royal
Ballet (as the Sadler’s Wells Ballet became in 1956). In her autobiography
Ms. Seymour called the movie “one of the revelatory experiences of my
childhood.” Yet you look at the movie, and you marvel that these girls wanted to
devote themselves to such an art.
The film’s story keeps turning and turning the screw. Vicky becomes
Lermontov’s latest star in the new ballet of “The Red Shoes” only to discover
love offstage with its composer, Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Like Nijinsky,
Massine and Ms. Farrell, Vicky marries Craster against Lermontov’s wish and
finds herself unemployed. Later she returns to Lermontov’s ballet company
without telling Craster. Finally, when both Lermontov and Craster are
threatening to withhold her twin needs — dance and love — the red ballet
slippers take matters into their own demonic, death-dealing grip.
They propel her out of her dressing room, out of the Monte Carlo opera house
where she is about to dance in (of course) “The Red Shoes,” into a leap off a
balcony (sheer “Tosca”) and into the path of an oncoming train (sheer “Anna
Karenina”). The film begins and ends with the image of a flame (stardom, life’s
brief candle) poised above the red shoes. It is those point shoes that bring the
flame’s greatest brightness and its final extinction.
Melodrama! Kitsch! Ham! Entirely undistinguished choreography! Add that its
“Red Shoes” ballet could never be danced onstage. (Its dissolving scene changes
are sheer cinema, and the ballerina role is too nonstop for any dancer’s
stamina.)
Even so, “The Red Shoes” remains a classic. Hans
Christian Andersen, who wrote the original story, was the son of a
shoemaker, and his own dreams of becoming a dancer were disappointed. Shoes and
feet recur, often painfully, in his stories, and never more cruelly than here.
The direction also brings out dark pressures that feel more like the dark force
of E. T. A. Hoffmann, the great storyteller who had powerfully influenced
Andersen in the first place. Lermontov: “Why do you want to dance?” Vicky: “Why
do you want to live?” Lermontov: “I don’t know, exactly, but I must.” Vicky:
“That’s my answer too.”
Dance isn’t just Vicky’s vocation; it’s her destiny. The real force of “The
Red Shoes” lies in the tension between impresario and ballerina. Wallbrook plays
Lermontov not quite realistically; the story’s feverish melodrama comes from
him, and he seems at once absurd and hypnotic. As Vicky, Shearer is compelling
in the opposite way, for her lack of exaggeration. Her dancing glows; her manner
is demure. In consequence she seems more real, more like us, than any other
character.
My own favorite episode, told with wonderful expansiveness by the directors,
Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell with scarcely a word spoken for two and a
half minutes (and no dancing), is when we feel destiny at its most seductively
mysterious. We’re in Monte Carlo. Lermontov has sent Vicky an invitation to meet
him in the evening.
In gala haute couture she is driven in his open-top car high above the
Mediterranean coast. The music builds to a climax. The chauffeur deposits her at
a half-closed palace gate, behind which a brick staircase is covered in weeds.
It’s as if she had arrived at Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
“Montez, mademoiselle,” the chauffeur says, and he leaves her there. Suddenly
it’s near silence. Then, as she starts to climb the staircase, her cloak
billowing behind her, we hear, inexplicably, a distant soprano voice in
sirenlike song. As Vicky reaches the top and approaches the house, we see the
sea.
The whole scene is the most mythic part of the film. Vicky seems to be moving
into fairy tale, legend, out of time. Where is her journey leading? What’s funny
— and it is one of the many examples of how “The Red Shoes” manages to transcend
its own melodramatic and kitschy nature — is that what awaits her inside the
house are men at work in their shirt sleeves. Lermontov offers her the central
role of the new ballet he is preparing with full sense of its importance, but he
and his colleagues are men at work, and they soon allow her to depart.
Throughout “The Red Shoes” romantic fantasy rubs shoulders with the daily
grind, yoked together by ballet. Though Lermontov was not a real-life person,
the film shows us places and people who were already part of ballet history: the
Royal
Opera House amid the old Covent Garden fruit-and-vegetable market; Marie
Rambert zealously watching a “Swan Lake” performance in the little Mercury
Theater; the opera houses of Paris and Monte Carlo; and Massine dancing his
original role in “La Boutique Fantasque,” which he had choreographed for
Diaghilev almost 30 years before. These were living legends; “The Red Shoes”
enshrines them.
The film pays fetishistic attention to all of ballet’s detailed contrivance:
the elaborate makeup, the constant audience-consciousness, the endless attention
to minutiae of musical timing and technical articulation. Brilliantly it closes
in on one particular feature of ballet technique: the way dancers “spot” in
turns, fixing their eyes on one focal point while turning so that their head is
the last part of the body to turn but the first to arrive. When Vicky dances the
Swan Queen at the tiny Mercury Theater in London, she finds that — by chance or
fate — she is spotting on Lermontov himself. She had not known he was present.
He is sizing up her star potential.
The camera here becomes Vicky: spotting, turning, spotting. What it shows is
what she sees: Lermontov (staring fixedly back), whirl, Lermontov.
These images turn “The Red Shoes” into what we might call a study of the
psychopathology of ballet. Physical fixations and psychological obsessions meet
as one. Ms. Seymour recounts in her autobiography that, when she saw it, “the
ballet became a state of
heart.”
