The Great Movies III

Quite so. In Colonel Blimp, Walbrook makes a German aristocrat sympathetic. In Max Ophuls's great La Ronde (1950), he is our urbane and charming guide to a decadent society. In The Red Shoes, he creates a deliberate enigma, a man who does not want to be understood, who imposes his will but conceals his feelings.

Vicky Page is his opposite: joyous and open to life. Shearer, who was twenty-one when she was cast, was at the time with the Sadler's Wells Company, dancing in the shadow of the young Margot Fonteyn. She didn't take movies seriously, waited a year before agreeing to star in The Red Shoes, went back to the ballet, and possibly never knew how good she was in the movie, how powerfully she related to the camera. "I never knew what a natural was before," Powell told the studio owner J. Arthur Rank. "But now I do. It's Moira Shearer."

The movie tells parallel stories leading up to its seventeen-minute ballet sequence. While Vicky and Julian are falling in love, Lermontov and his company are creating the new ballet. There is a key scene where Lermontov and all his colleagues meet in his villa to hear Julian play the new ballet for the first time. "I was determined to shoot it in one big master shot," Powell wrote, and it is a masterpiece of composition, of entrances, exits, approaches to the camera, background action, and the vibrating sense of a creative team at work. "There are lots of clever scenes in The Red Shoes," he wrote, "but this is the heart of the picture."

The other key scenes are the ballet itself, and the sequence leading up to the ending. No film had ever interrupted its story for an extended ballet before The Red Shoes, although its success made that a fashion, and An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain, among others, have extended fantasy ballet sequences. None ever looked as fantastical as the one in the The Red Shoes, where the little shoemaker puts the fatal slippers on the girl. The physical stage is seamlessly transformed into a surreal space, where Shearer glides and flies, enters unreal landscapes, and even does a pas de deux with a newspaper that takes the form of a dancer, turns into the dancer, and then into a newspaper again. The cinematographer Jack Cardiff wrote about how he manipulated camera speed to make the dancers seem to linger at the tops of their jumps; the art direction won an Oscar, mostly because of this scene (there was also an Oscar for the music, and nominations for best picture, editing, and screenplay).

After Vicky and Julian are married and Lermontov fires them, he persuades her to dance The Red Shoes one more time. Julian walks out of the premiere of his new symphony in London to fly to Monte Carlo and accuse her of abandoning him. What will she choose? The dance, or her husband? She puts on the red slippers, and in a brilliant closeup the slippers force her to turn around, and seem to lead her as she runs from the theater and throws herself in front of a train. Discussing the script, Pressburger argued that Vicky couldn't be wearing the red shoes when she runs away, because the ballet had not yet started. Powell writes: "I was a director, a storyteller, and I knew that she must. I didn't try to explain it. I just did it."

That brings us back to the tension we began with. Why does Lermontov object so violently to the marriage of these two young people? Is it sexualjealousy? Does he desire Vicky, or, for that matter, Julian? Lermontov is a bachelor with the elegant wardrobe and mannered detachment that played as gay in the 1940s, but there is not a moment when he displays any sexual feelings. He would rather die than appear vulnerable. My notion is that Lermontov is Mephistopheles. He has made a bargain with Vicky: "I will make you the greatest dancer the world has ever known." But he warns her: "A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer-never." Like the Satan of classical legend, he is enraged when he wins her soul only to lose it again. He demands obedience above all else.

That leaves us with Vicky's choice. She can return to London with Julian, or leave him and continue her career. Why does she abandon these choices at the height of her youth and beauty, and kill herself? The answer of course is that she is powerless, once she puts on the red shoes.

A newly restored print was released in 2009 on Criterion.

That's OK. I didn't expect thanks.

TOM RIPLEY, WIPING SPIT FROM HIS FACE

om Ripley is fascinating in the sense that a snake is fascinating. He can kill you, but he will not take it personally and neither should you. He is well educated, has good taste, is a connoisseur of art, music, food, wine, and architecture, can give a woman good reason to love him, and commits crimes and gets away with them. "I don't worry about being caught," he says, "because I don't believe anyone is watching." By "anyone," he means cops, witnesses, God, whoever.