The Red Shoes
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Running time: 2hrs14 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes
When I was a very small child, one of my most treasured books was a hardback omnibus of Hans Christian Andersen fairytales: yellowed, much-leafed and rather stingily illustrated (all the better to exercise my young imagination, I suppose), it had belonged to my father at a similarly tender age. I don’t know entirely why Andersen’s stories in particular so resonated with me, though I remember thinking that their decidedly Christian severity — fixated as they were on virtue and consequence and mortality, not especially in line with how I’d been more kindly raised — was rather excitingly austere and grown-up. I was well acquainted with his sombre telling of The Little Mermaid, whose original fishtailed heroine ends up not as an earthly bride but as foam on the sea, when the Disney film came out, and as enthralled as I was with the cartoon’s colour and wit and banger-laden soundtrack (which I promptly bought on cassette tape with my dutifully saved pocket money), I thought its happy ending a cop-out, which might tell you something about the boy I was.
That was essentially my first experience of reckoning with the complexities and compromises of literary adaptation of film, and it was followed up not long after by another Andersen interpretation, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, which my dad taped for my benefit off a classic movie channel. What a thrill! This wild, balletic take on the fairytale diverged far, far more drastically from the source than any Disney version might have done. The original’s macabre spirit of punitive tragedy was honoured to my satisfaction, and embellished with a florid romantic yearning that effectively served as my gateway to the joys of high adult melodrama. I’d never seen anything like it before; all children’s films suddenly seemed wan and timid by comparison. Of course they did, for The Red Shoes isn’t a children’s film at all: it’s that rare, now barely-existent hybrid that presents adult desires and conflicts with such an ebullient spirit of fantasy and ecstasy — saturated in colours that feel, in the moment, previously unseen on screen — that they become urgent and understandable to anyone.
Three decades and change later, The Red Shoes works exactly the same way on me, snaring me up each time in ill-fated ballerina Vicky’s torn tug-of-war between art and love as if I’d never encountered such a story before — either here or in countless other heated backstage dramas. There’s a tension here between real, ruinous human feeling and outlandish whimsy: Andersen’s very concept of shoes that wear you rather than the other way round, possibly to the point of death, is both a wicked, darkly funny terror and a rather affecting metaphor for a life spinning and spinning and spinning out of control. I found The Red Shoes magnetically frightening as a child, both in its plotting and its more extravagantly burlesque imagery, which is easy to forget as an adult, when its lavishly choreographed beauty and musicality are mostly what we remember. But like many a Powell and Pressburger film, it gazes exhilaratingly into the abyss of what human existence can offer or threaten, and the void isn’t dark but painted in golds and emeralds and, of course, the red of blood and lipstick and silk slippers. Watch it again if it’s been a while, or even if it hasn’t: it’s never exactly as you recall.
THE RED SHOES (1948) Written by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger | Shot by Jack Cardiff | Edited by Reginald Mills