The Red Shoes

The 1948 classic by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, has now been vividly restored for a cinema re-release and it just blazes out of the screen: profoundly serious, sublimely innocent, yet deeply and mysteriously erotic. This is the compelling parable of the destructive demands made by art upon the artist, and upon performing artists expected to sublimate their emotions into a quasi-sexual submission to their director – a parable that seems to change into a portrait of psychotic disorder or actual demonic possession. It is also, incidentally, a portrait of an age in which the marriage contract instantly nullified a woman's professional identity. Moira Shearer is the beautiful English ingenue Vicky Page, who, on the premature retirement of her ballet company's leading lady, is catapulted to the position of prima ballerina. She has been promoted by Boris Lermontov, the company's exacting and demanding director, a martinet unforgettably played by Anton Walbrook with superbly weary elegance and fastidious disdain for all that is second rate. His handsome, sensitive, lined face is deeply expressive of both passion and pain. Although the ttle s Red Shoes the film has more than just that.