The Red Shoes is one movie that promises you bright, burning color right from the start. It's there in the title, in the image of the red silk ballet slippers, in the flaming hair of ballerina Moira Shearer, the film's leading lady. Often cited as one of the most gorgeous movies of all time, The Red Shoes inspired filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Brian de Palma. But while the look of the film is indeed mesmerizing, I suspect The Red Shoes remains irresistible to artists because it's about the need for art and beauty. Director Michael Powell himself summed up the film's unusual appeal when it came out in 1948, an initial failure that turned into an international success: 'For ten years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.'

In the original Hans Christian Andersen story from which the film takes its name and much of its plot, the red shoes were a symbol of female vanity when a young girl takes too much pride in her beautiful red shoes. For the sin of wearing them to church, she's condemned to dance in them, painfully and endlessly, until finally, someone chops off her feet and the shoes with them. Filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger took the original idea of the red dancing shoes, jettisoned the moralizing, and recreated the story as a tale of an aspiring ballerina, Vicky Page, whose deep desire to dance is the force that keeps those blood-soaked shoes moving. What makes the story a tragedy is not her lack of piety, but the struggle between the human desire to love and the equally strong desire to create. Vicky wants both and is forced to make a terrible choice between them. In the end, Powell and Pressburger's film re-envisions the red shoes as an object not just of horror but of great beauty, as well, where instead of being a symbol of weakness and vanity, they're a symbol of art itself.

The Red Shoes is a very strange film in that it begins as a reasonably traditional story of eager young artists, ordinary in everything but their talents, and slowly turns into a nightmarish fairy tale. We follow the fortunes of composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and ballerina Victoria 'Vicky' Page (Moira Shearer), two naive hopefuls who end up working for the Ballet Lermontov. Both catch the attention of the ballet's perfectionist, dictatorial impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). Lermontov approves of Craster but it's Vicky who truly captures his imagination; he becomes totally convinced that it's her destiny to be a great dancer and his destiny to make her one. He chooses her to be the star of the company's new ballet, 'The Red Shoes,' for which Craster will write the score. Vicky dances the part to great acclaim and for a brief time, she and Lermontov are united in their ambitions for her career. But then, in a plot twist only Lermontov considers an abomination, Vicky and Craster fall in love. Lermontov refuses to allow even the slightest shift in Vicky's dedication to art (and in her obedience to him), kicking the couple out of his company. However, fate ties this trio together and before long, it becomes clear all three of them are locked in a struggle just as merciless as the dance of the red shoes.

In later years, Moira Shearer, a career ballerina herself who later peacefully retired, would comment dryly that the story seemed to her, at the time, like 'a typical woman's magazine view of the theatre...there was never a ballet company anywhere which was like that.' However, the conflicts that seemed melodramatic and overblown to Shearer on paper make perfect sense when the story is re-told in the language of cinema. Powell and Pressburger, along with cinematographer Jack Cardiff and production designer Hein Heckroth, pour so much beauty and detail into creating Vicky's world that it seems only right that the characters drive themselves mad with it.

While some Technicolor films delight in extravagant color in every direction, The Red Shoes is extremely controlled in its use, as if mimicking the perfectionist needs of the Lermontov character. Whenever red appears, it's nearly always the focal point of the scene, whether it's Vicky's brilliant satin shoes or her corona of hair (Moira Shearer's hair has to be one of the most fortunate coincidences in casting history). But the dominant color is actually cool blue and in scenes where Vicky is firmly enmeshed in Lermontov's world, the blue floods over everything as if to say his colder nature has taken over. In one of the film's most magically dreamlike moments, Vicky walks up the steps of what almost looks like a fairy tale palace, dressed in a magnificent turquoise blue gown and tiara that calls back to Josette Day in Beauty and the Beast. Lermontov informs her that she has won the starring role in 'The Red Shoes' Ballet. Another movie would have played this scene as a simple moment of triumph for the gutsy newcomer, but The Red Shoes keeps it hushed and unreal. Watching blue shadows slant over this beautiful woman in her impossible dress, it's equally impossible not to feel as dazed as Vicky does.


The one color conspicuously absent from The Red Shoes is green. In a movie that seems to glory in the lavish unreality of the ballet world, its makeup and costumes and sets, the lack of green feels like a deliberate rejection of the living world outside. It's worth noting when Vicky first meets Lermontov at a fancy part, she steps through green curtains. From then on, we almost never see Vicky next to anything green until the film's third act, when she finally breaks from Lermontov. They have a tense 'accidental' meeting at the train station and for the first time, Moira Shearer's dressed in bright green. But in a matter of minutes, Lermontov has convinced her to come back and dance the red shoes, and Vicky's brief rebellion is gone. From then on, we see her only in the brilliant blue eye makeup and blue ribbons and red shoes of her starring role.

'The Red Shoes' ballet is both the visual centerpiece of the film and its most breathlessly ambitious highpoint, a strange, often surreal trip beginning with Vicky playing the girl from the Andersen story and buying the mystical shoes from a Mephistophelean shoemaker (not often you get to say that). It swiftly turns into a journey unfolding with dreamlike logic as the ballet's ceaselessly moving heroine finds herself dancing with men crumpling into newspapers and fleeing from twisted creatures that appear to be what's left of humanity at the end of time itself. The ballet was choreographed by the famous Robert Helpmann (also acting in the film as the Ballet Lermontov's chief male dancer) and it's easy to see why it knocked audiences for a loop back in 1948.

There are devoted realists out there that complain that the ballet performed in the film could not possibly be danced in real life, as it mingles special effects, matte paintings, and impossible choreography, and on top of everything else, appears to be only seventeen minutes long. But such complaints are easy to ignore because The Red Shoes is not really about ballet. It's about how ballet makes these characters feel, and by extension, how artists feel about their art. In this film, a life devoted to one thing is tragic but also ruthlessly beautiful. It would be difficult to imagine any of the stagestruck young girls flocking to the theaters in the '40s to take in the image of Shearer, the ballerina, and hoping she would ditch Lermontov and ballet to run off with her boring boyfriend.

I've given precious little space to the actual characters in The Red Shoes, not because they're not worthy of an article in and of themselves, but because the visuals are so overwhelming. But, the visuals would feel incomplete without the weight of strong performances backing them. Moira Shearer as the protagonist Vicky is so remarkably poised for the role, so forthright in the way she meets Lermontov's eye and smiles at him with the perfect understanding of their shared obsession. It's hard to credit director Michael Powell's assertion that he had to practically drag this performance out of her. Marius Goring, an old Powell and Pressburger standby, is reliably earnest as her composer-lover, but the film leaves him to dry somewhere around the middle. Standing as the third point of the triangle, Goring and Shearer's oddly chaste, mostly off-screen romance doesn't seem like a worthy counterpoint to the gradually growing insanity of Vicky's Svengali, Lermontov. It's one of the great ironies of The Red Shoes that Lermontov, played by the incomparable Anton Walbrook, is the coldest, driest, most ruthless person in the whole film and yet he is also the one who seems to suffer the most by the end. He sees something in Vicky, something that moves him more than human love ('adolescent nonsense,' he sneers at one point) and he'd gladly destroy all her other relationships if she'd only continue to dance for him.

It's certain The Red Shoes will continue to keep casting a spell for decades to come. Few films come closer to capturing the ruthless, inexorable pull that artists feel toward their craft. It's hard to watch it and not want to share a little in Vicky and Lermontov's passion for performance, even if it means one has to keep on dancing and dancing and never stop.

Aubyn Eli blogs about color movies-and a whole of black-and-white ones-at The Girl with the White Parasol.