Directed by: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Starring: Moira Shearer, Marius Goring, Anton Walbrook, Léonide Massine
Not the best of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s impressive gallery of movies, still The Red Shoes (1948) is probably the best known—and owing to its fairy-tale romanticism, probably the best loved. As a story, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Michael Curtiz’s horror picture The Mad Genius (1931), with John Barrymore as a ballet impresario coming between a dancer and the woman he loves—but that’s perhaps as much due to the fact that both Barrymore’s character there and Anton Walbrook’s here are fairly obviously drawn from the real-life Sergei Diaghilev. Powell and Pressburger change the sexes—the dancer is now a woman—and bury the subtext, but the story of the conflict between art and romance remains largely the same.
Otherwise, The Red Shoes is an almost relentless exercise in style—brightly Technicolored style. And due to the filmmakers’ penchant for ballet, there’s a good deal of ballet in the film. Don’t let that throw you, even if you’re not that keen on ballet, because this is so thrillingly photographed you’ll like it here. Typical of the filmmakers’ work, The Red Shoes is also a strikingly modern work. There are uses of the camera and editing that were unique at the time, but have since become a part of the cinematic vocabulary still in use today. This is a treasure of film, music, dance, romance and color that shouldn’t be missed.
The Hendersonville Film Society will show The Red Shoes at 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13, in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community, 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville. (From Asheville, take I-26 to U.S. 64 West, turn right at the third light onto Thompson Street. Follow to the Lake Point Landing entrance and park in the lot on the left.)
Commenters email addresses are never displayed. Do not insert HTML code.
To create a live link, simply type the URL (without http://) and it will be active.
There are no comments for this entry.
