The Red Shoes (1948) on Netflix
Victoria Page joins Ballet Lermontov, where Boris Lermontov builds a new ballet around her, scored by Julian Craster. She loves Julian, but Lermontov expects complete devotion to the company.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb8.1/1044,256 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes98%
Trailer
Plot summary
Julian Craster, a London music student, walks out of a Ballet Lermontov performance of Heart of Fire when he recognizes his own music in a score credited to his professor. Victoria Page and her aunt Lady Neston are in the audience. Lady Neston gives a party for the company's director, Boris Lermontov, and Victoria tells him that nothing matters to her as much as dancing. He invites her to join the troupe in Paris. Julian writes to Lermontov about the plagiarism, then comes to take the letter back; Lermontov hires him as a répétiteur. When the principal dancer Irina Boronskaya marries and leaves the company, Lermontov mounts a new ballet drawn from the Hans Christian Andersen tale, with Victoria in the lead and Julian composing the score.
Cast
- Gordon Littmannas Ike
- Julia Langas A Balletomane
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Red Shoes (1948)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Moira Shearer declined the role on reading the screenplay, feeling a film would harm her dancing career and that the ballet company in it was utterly unlike any that had ever been anywhere; she recalled fighting for a year to get away from the film and not being able to shake the director off.
- The shoot overran significantly, totalling twenty-four weeks rather than the planned fifteen, and the budget ballooned to over £500,000; John Davis, chief accountant of The Rank Organisation, forced a £10,000 cut to Powell and Pressburger's salaries because of it.
- The character of Boris Lermontov was inspired in part by Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario who founded the Ballets Russes: the episode said to have shaped him is Diaghilev seeing the 14-year-old Diana Gould dance and inviting her to join his company, only to die before that plan could come about.
- Restoration formally began in the fall of 2006 at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, with fundraising spearheaded by Martin Scorsese and Powell's widow, the editor Thelma Schoonmaker; Robert Gitt and Barbara Whitehead reviewed every frame, 192,960 in the print and 578,880 in the tripartite negative.
- The score was completed in an unorthodox manner: Easdale wrote the music for the film's central ballet from cartoon drawings and storyboards approved by Helpmann and assembled in the correct sequence, 120 drawings in all.
- Brian Easdale received the 1948 Academy Award for Best Original Score, the first British film composer to be so honored.
SPOILER
At the end of the film Vicky jumps onto the train tracks wearing the red shoes she had on in her dressing room, although in the performance her character does not put them on until part way through the ballet; Powell decided that was artistically right, since without them the ambiguity over why she died disappears.- The film was a major financial success and the first British film in history to gross over $5 million in theatrical rentals in the United States.
