The Red Shoes (1948) |
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The Red Shoes Cast |
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Movie Highlights |
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AwardsBest Motion Picture Score Golden Globes [1949] (Won/Nominated: Won) Best British Film BAFTA Awards [1949] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Writing, Motion Picture Story Academy Awards [1949] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Picture Academy Awards [1949] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Film Editing Academy Awards [1949] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture Academy Awards [1949] (Won/Nominated: Won) Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color Academy Awards [1949] (Won/Nominated: Won) Golden Lion Venice Film Festival [1948] (Won/Nominated: Nominated) Plot SummaryMichael Powell and Emeric Pressburger`s influential musical tragedy set the stage for the climactic dance ballets that became a staple of the Arthur Freed-MGM musicals (An American in Paris, Singin` in the Rain and The Band Wagon) of the early 1950s.... TaglineBetween her art ... and her dreams ... was her heart A Dancing, Singing, Swinging Love Tale Dance she did, and dance she must - between her two loves Related MoviesThe Red Shoes [Version of] (Year of movie: 1983) DiscographySinglesExcerpt from `Coppelia` Excerpt from `Giselle` Excerpt from `La Boutique Fantastique` Excerpt from `Les Sylphides` Excerpts from `Swan Lake` Aria Dance Music The Ballet of The Red Shoes |
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Full Cast and Crew |
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Fans |
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The Red Shoes has no fans yet!
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Trivia |
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Trivia and QuotesQuotes Boris Lermontov: [to Julian Craster] It is worth remembering, that it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from, hmmm?
Julian Craster: One day when I`m old, I want some lovely young girl to say to me, "Tell me, where in your long life, Mr. Caster, were you most happy?" And I shall say, `Well, my dear, I never knew the exact place. It was somewhere on the Mediterranean. I was with Victoria Page." "What?" she will say. "Do you mean the famous dancer?" I will nod. "Yes, my dear, I do. Then she was quite young, comparatively unspoiled. We were, I remember, very much in love."
Julian Craster: Vicky?
Victoria Page: Julian I love you!
Julian Craster: But you love that more.
[last lines]
Victoria Page: Julian?
Julian Craster: Yes, my darling?
Victoria Page: Take off the red shoes.
[first lines]
[holding doors closed]
Doorman: They`re going mad, sir. It`s the students.
[From outside]
Julian Craster: Down with tyrants!
Manager, Covent Garden: All right, let them in.
Boris Lermontov: You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never.
Grischa Ljubov: You can`t alter human nature.
Boris Lermontov: No? I think you can do even better then that. You can ignore it!
Boris Lermontov: Why do you want to dance?
[Vicky thinks for a short while]
Victoria Page: Why do you want to live?
[Lermontov is suprised at the answer]
Boris Lermontov: Well I don`t know exactly why, er, but I must.
Victoria Page: That`s my answer too.
Boris Lermontov: How would you define ballet, Lady Neston?
Lady Neston: Well, one might call it the poetry of motion perhaps, or...
Boris Lermontov: One might. But for me it is a great deal more. For me it is a religion. And one doesn`t really care to see one`s religion practised in an atmosphere... such as this.
[Describing the ballet of the Red Shoes]
Boris Lermontov: "The Ballet of The Red Shoes" is from a fairy tale by Hans Andersen. It is the story of a young girl who is devoured with an ambition to attend a dance in a pair of Red Shoes. She gets the shoes and goes to the dance. For a time, all goes well and she is very happy. At the end of the evening she is tired and wants to go home, but the Red Shoes are not tired. In fact, the Red Shoes are never tired. They dance her out into the street, they dance her over the mountains and valleys, through fields and forests, through night and day. Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on.
Julian Craster: What happens in the end?
Boris Lermontov: Oh, in the end, she dies.
Boris Lermontov: Don`t forget, a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit.
[Before the curtain goes up on the premiere]
Livingstone `Livy` Montagne: You`re a magician, Boris. To have produced all this in three weeks, and from nothing.
Boris Lermontov: My dear Livy, not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat.
Trivia Anton Walbrook`s character of Lermontov was generally thought to be based on ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the man behind Vaslav Nijinsky. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, however, were more inclined to say that he was a representation of their first main mentor, Alexander Korda. Emeric Pressburger originally wrote the script in 1937 when producer Alexander Korda was casting around for a project for his wife, Merle Oberon. The intention was that a professional dancer would fill in for Oberon in the dancing scenes. Nothing ever came of it - mainly due to the intervention of the war - and Michael Powell and Pressburger were able to buy the rights for the screenplay back from Korda for £12,000 in 1947. To do this, however, they had to pretend that it was purely for sentimental reasons and not because they wanted to make it into a film. Having worked for Korda before, they both knew that he was a very shrewd businessman and that, if he detected they really wanted the property, he would have raised the price.
Moira Shearer`s first film. The film went massively over budget and the Rank Company (which financed it and was to release it) had little faith in its commercial potential. It tried to bury the film by not giving it a premiere (backer J. Arthur Rank walked out of its first performance) and by just letting it quietly show at late screenings at a cinema in London. Rank wasn`t even prepared to strike a print for the American market. Slowly, however, audiences started to pick up on the film and Rank realized that it might have a potential breakout hit after all. Indeed, when an initial print was made for the US, it played at an off-Broadway theater for an unprecedented 110 weeks. That was enough to convince Universal to take up the distribution rights for the US, which it did in 1951. Jack Cardiff deliberately manipulated camera speed during the Red Shoes ballet to create the effect of dancers almost hovering in mid-air at the peak of their jumps. When Ludovic Kennedy saw Moira Shearer in this film, he said that he knew instantly that she was going to be the girl he would marry. He actively sought her out and married her two years later, in February 1950 in the Chapel Royal in London`s Hampton Court Palace. This film is #8 in the "BFI 100", a list of 100 of "the best British films ever" compiled by the British Film Institute in 1999/2000. On her first day of shooting, Moira Shearer got badly sunburned and developed a blister on her back. Later in the production she also wrenched her neck quite badly when called to leap from a window, and received a scratch that turned into an abscess. Shearer would often find herself being suspended in a harness for up to eight hours while being buffeted by wind machines. Art director Hein Heckroth was a painter who had never worked on a film before. He created a 15-minute "animatic" (filmed storyboard) reel to convey the type of mood and feel his sets would give, which acted as an ideal guide for cinematographer Jack Cardiff. The 15-minute (approximately) "Ballet of the Red Shoes" used a corps de ballet of 53 dancers. Technicolor founders Herbert T. Kalmus and Natalie Kalmus considered this film the best example of Three-Strip Technicolor. During the filming however, Natalie Kalmus often complained that Jack Cardiff wasn`t following the rules laid down for Technicolor films and demanded that they re-shoot various scenes. But Michael Powell always backed up Cardiff and they got the film they wanted. Allan Gray was dismissed as the film`s composer to be replaced by Brian Easdale who won an Oscar for his work on the film. The title ballet sequence took six weeks to shoot and employed over 120 paintings by Hein Heckroth. The dancing newspaper was achieved through careful cutting and use of wires.
Casting the role of Vicky Page was a tough call for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Ideally they wanted a ballerina who could act and who also had to be ravishingly beautiful. They were thrilled when they discovered Moira Shearer who was second to Margot Fonteyn at the famous Sadler`s Wells Ballet, but she initially rebuffed them. In the year it took to persuade her to come round, the directors were forced to consider casting actresses like `Ann Todd (I)` and Hazel Court, and cheating with a real ballerina in the ballet sequences. Brian Easdale`s Oscar-winning score was performed for the film by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff wasn`t keen on doing a ballet film so he forced himself to take in as many ballet productions as he could to familiarize himself with this art form. He was soon won over. Much to his surprise, Michael Powell had great difficulty persuading Moira Shearer to be in the film. She held out for a year before giving in to him. Shearer herself, however, did not particularly care for Powell. In later years, she described the making of the film as being a terrible ordeal: Powell was distant and aloof and never really gave her much direction; and having to dance for hours on end on concrete floors also physically took its toll on all the dancers, making their legs swell up. When people complained to Hein Heckroth about the grim ending, he pointed out to them that in Hans Christian Andersen`s original fairy tale, the ballerina had her feet hacked off by a woodsman to stop her dancing. The exterior of The Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate was shown in the rain because Michael Powell had often gone there to see plays or the ballet and he reminisced "it always seemed to be raining when one queued up for Madame Rambert`s productions". | ||
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