OT Ballet's Mean Streets
Matthew Kruk
Op-Ed Columnist
Ballet's Mean Streets
By MAUREEN DOWD
Some movies you have to watch whenever they're on.
One of those, for me, is "The Red Shoes." Like its doomed heroine, I'm
pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a
lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.
There are many great works of art about obsession, from Heathcliff's
wailing to Ahab's whaling, but this is surely the most gorgeously
haunting. The destructive obsession portrayed here is not with a lover
or outside object of desire. It's about the tyranny of creativity.
As the white-skinned, blue-blooded ballerina Vicky Page, Moira Shearer
dons the red slippers and is forced to choose between love and art.
There was never a screen pairing more magical than Moira and
Technicolor. The flame-haired Scottish dancer is so radiant in the
Criterion DVD of the 1948 classic directed by Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger that it's impossible to believe she could glow more
brightly. But in the lovingly polished version of the British movie that
debuted at Cannes and is now showing at Film Forum in New York, Moira is
even more incandescent.
The original backers of the movie had so little confidence that a
stylized tragic ballet film could do well that they didn't even give it
an official London premiere.
Now Martin Scorsese calls "The Red Shoes" "one of the true miracles of
film history." He long ago began an obsessive campaign to restore Powell's
reputation. His Film Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive
have taken the lead in digitally alchemizing the movie from cracked,
shrunk, moldy negatives.
Scorsese fell in love with the movies of Powell and Pressburger when he
was an asthmatic kid living in a four-room tenement apartment in New
York, watching "Million Dollar Movie" on TV and going to theaters with
his dad.
"They have a flair and flamboyance you don't usually find in films being
made at that time," he told me. "And a fearlessness about emotion. They
create worlds that take no prisoners."
In "Black Narcissus," their 1947 movie about a lustful nun in the
Himalayas, played by Deborah Kerr - they seemed drawn to redheads for
Technicolor - the sister faints from sexual desire and the screen goes
orange. "That's such a wonderful way to express desire," Scorsese
marveled.
In a letter to Kerr in the early '40s, Pressburger laid out their
manifesto, including: "No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly
believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they
will pay to see the truth, for no other reason than her nakedness."
In the early '70s, Scorsese tracked down the broke and discredited
Powell in London and took him to a pub.
"Michael was very surprised to hear that his films had thrilled a
younger audience and given fuel to the imagination of myself and Brian
De Palma and Francis Coppola," Scorsese once recalled. "He went home
that night and recorded in his diary that he felt his blood course
through his veins again after meeting us in the bar."
In 1980, Coppola invited Powell to become a consultant at Zoetrope
Studios. He moved to America and married Scorsese's film editor, Thelma
Schoonmaker.
It is interesting that Powell twice counseled Scorsese against the color
red. He didn't like the red boxing gloves in the early rushes of "Raging
Bull" and urged Scorsese to switch to a black-and-white film. (He did.)
Powell told him "Mean Streets" had too much red lighting and he should
take some out. (He didn't.)
"The Red Shoes" is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the
same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and
gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the
girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an
even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.
The shimmering Moira Shearer could never take off the red shoes, either.
"To be constantly associated with that one film is really quite
dismaying," she once said. "It's as though I'd done nothing else in my
life. I mean, it's odd, when you're 61, to be haunted by something you've
done when you were 21!"
She resisted doing the movie, finding the script "silly and banal"; she
feared it would deflect her from a classical ballet career. And when she
died at 80 in 2006, her husband dismissively called her film work "a bit
of a distraction."
Shearer said she faced hostility when she returned to the ballet world
from some who considered her overnight movie fame frivolous. She always
worried that she was succeeding more for her looks than her dancing.
She was eclipsed by Margot Fonteyn, married, had four children and
receded. She wrote a book about her experiences with George Balanchine.
As Clive Barnes wrote in Dance Magazine, "She had a disappointing and
disappointed dance career."
In later years, Shearer was asked to give her occupation in "Who's Who."
"Writer," she replied.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Magnus
> November 8, 2009
> Op-Ed Columnist
> Ballet's Mean Streets
> By MAUREEN DOWD
>
> Some movies you have to watch whenever they're on.
>
> One of those, for me, is "The Red Shoes." Like its doomed heroine, I'm
> pulled inexorably along by the bewitched crimson ballet slippers into a
> lush, swirling landscape that turns into an inescapable, bloody hell.
>
This is one of my favorite films. The cast is outstanding, and
Shearer's dancing magnificent, though I believe she is even better as
the life-sized, mechanical doll Olympia in "Tales of Hoffman"--another
Powell and Pressberger production.
I was disappointed to find that Shearer had such a horrible time
making the film, and that she was especially hard on the producers,
who, for instance, had the dancers perform on a concrete floor. One
does want the stars of one's favorite films to love the film, but very
often that doesn't happen.
This film had an enormous impact at the time, especially in drawing
young girls to ballet. If Shearer did nothing else for this exacting
art form, she stirred interest in it from future performers and those
who had stars in their eyes at the prospect of living for art ("Vissi
d'arte," as Tosca sings).
Yeats, a typical Romantic, once said that one must choose between
perfection of the life and perfection of the work. This film
underscores that idea in a grand manner. There is no question about
which side it comes down on, despite the tragic ending.
I have posted on this film before, and somewhere in the archive there
is probably an interview with Moira Shearer that lays out her
experience of the film in some detail. I have always been in love with
Moira Shearer, though I don't know at this late period whether my love
wasn't Vicky Page after all. I do know that Shearer's work will live
in a way that that of more famous ballerinas--Margot Fonteyn, for
example--will not. Shearer was wrong to be dismissive of her efforts.
Magnus