The Red Shoes - DVD Special Edition

Aspect ratio: 4:3 Full Frame
Sound: Mono
Year made: 1948
Country: United Kingdom
Duration: 153 mins.
Print: Colour
Genre: Classic Drama / Romance / Musical
USED

Anton Walbrook .... Boris Lermontov
Marius Goring .... Julian Craster
Moira Shearer .... Victoria Page
Robert Helpmann .... Ivan Boleslawsky
Léonide Massine .... Grischa Ljubov
Albert Bassermann .... Sergei Ratov
Ludmilla Tchérina .... Irina Boronskaja
Esmond Knight .... Livingstone 'Livy' Montagne

This film is 9th in the "BFI 100", a list of a hundred of "the best British films ever" compiled by the British Film Institute in 1999/2000.

Under the authoritarian rule of charismatic ballet impressario Boris Lermontov, his proteges realize the full promise of their talents, but at a price: utter devotion to their art and complete loyalty to Lermontov himself. Under his near-obsessive guidance, young ballerina Victoria Page is poised for superstardom, but earns Lermontov's scorn when she falls in love with Julian Craster, composer of "The Red Shoes," the ballet Lermontov is staging to showcase her talents. Vicky leaves the company and marries Craster, but still finds herself torn between Lermontov's demands and those of her heart.

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 and Hazel Court, and cheating with a real ballerina in the ballet sequences.

The film went massively over-budget and the Rank Company (who financed it and were to release it) had little faith in its commercial potential. They tried to bury it 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. They weren'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 they might have a potential break-out hit after all. Indeed, when an initial print was made for the States, 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 United States, which they did in 1951.

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 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 that they really wanted the property, he would have raised the price.

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.
On her first day of shooting, Moira Shearer got badly sun burnt 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 which turned into an abscess. Shearer would often find herself being suspended in a harness for up to 8 hours, whilst being buffeted by wind machines.

Brian Easdale's Oscar-winning score was performed for the film by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham.

Awards: Won 2 Oscars. Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture & Best Art Direction-Set Decoration. Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture Score & 5 nominations including Bafta Best British Film

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