Revisiting The Red Shoes

Moira Shearer as Vicky Page.

Black Narcissus is my favorite Michael Powell-Emeric Pressberger film--and I also think it's their masterpiece. But most critics and fans confer that "masterpiece" title on the duo's The Red Shoes (1948). I watched it many years ago, but, honestly, it didn't leave a significant impression. However, after recently viewing Made in England, an excellent documentary about Powell and Pressberger--and listening to Martin Scorsese gush about The Red Shoes' influence--I decided to give it another try.

For those who have not seen it, the plot revolves around three characters: ballet company impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), and composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Each is dedicated to the musical arts, but to varying degrees. 

Anton Walbrook as Lermontov.

Lermontov lives for his ballet company--its employees are his family. When his star ballerina joyously announces her engagement to the company, Lermontov disappears into the wings of the theater. He is already deciding who will replace her. His preference for the ballet company over the people that comprise it earns him disdain at times. One colleague refers to him as a "gifted, cruel monster."

Julian is dedicated to his music. He wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about it and rushes to the piano to transcribe it. However, Julian can balance his profession and his personal life, especially after he falls in love with Vicky.

Vicky is torn between her need to dance and her love for Julian. Like Lermontov, she is obsessed with ballet and cannot live without it. Yet, she loves Julian passionately and cannot envision a life without him. When circumstances prevent her from dancing for Lermontov's company and being with Julian, Vicky confronts an existence that's burning from both ends.

While the characters portray the conflict between art and "real life," director Michael Powell visualizes it for the audience. The centerpiece of The Red Shoes is an audacious original ballet that literally pulls the viewer from the audience into an imaginary world. Powell opens the scene showing the curtains drawing back to reveal a solitary dancer, a shoe cobbler holding red ballet slippers, on the stage. Then, he cuts to a shot of the village that crops out the framing of the stage. The viewer is now on the stage with the performers and immersed into their world. 

Vicky dancing with a newspaper man.

Over the next fifteen minutes, the ballet is presented as an almost surrealistic film, recounting Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale of The Red Shoes. It's a colorful, energetic, sometimes visually frightening display of artistry, with Moira Shearer gliding past sheets of gel, floating through the air, and dancing with a man made of newspapers. The ballet ends with the protagonist's death and the shoe cobbler with the red slippers on the stage alone as the curtains draw to a close.

The controlling ballet shoes.

Powell and Pressberger merge their "real" and fantasy worlds in the climax to The Red Shoes. When Vicky appears to choose her career over love, Julian storms out of her dressing room. As Vicky walks toward the stage, her red ballet shoes seemingly take on a life of their own--forcing her to run out of the theater and toward a moving train. (It's no surprise that a train features prominently in this sequence, since Powell foreshadows its importance by integrating it into numerous scenes earlier in the film.)

Anton Walbrook is the standout among the cast. In his third Powell-Pressberger film, Walbrook gets a chance to portray a complex character that straddles the line between supportive and manipulative. Lermontov is an unforgiving taskmaster, but he recognizes artistic brilliance and supports it. When Vicky wants to leave the ballet company to be with Julian, Lermontov releases her from her contract. But when given a chance to see her again, he pressures her to come back into the fold. He wants to be gracious, but ultimately he must do what he feels is right for the ballet company.

Do I now rank The Red Shoes over Black Narcissus? No, the latter is still my favorite Powell & Pressberger film. But I am glad I watched The Red Shoes again. I have grown to admire its dazzling  colorful imagery, Powell's bold directing, and the film's exploration of the thin line between real world and the fantasy world created through visual and aural artistry.

Corbucci's The Great Silence

Jean-Louis Trintignant as Silence.

The most acclaimed Spaghetti Western filmmaker not named Sergio Leone. 

That's an apt description for Sergio Corbucci, a prolific Italian director and screenwriter whose career spanned four decades. Although he directed comedies, horror films, and sand-and-scandal epics, Corbucci is best known for his Spaghetti Westerns, especially Django (1966). Inspired by his friend Leone, Corbucci crafted a violent, allegorical Western that generated dozens of imitations and grew in critical stature over the years. Still, many critics now consider it Corbucci's second-best film--hailing The Great Silence as his masterpiece.

Released in 1968, The Great Silence takes place in Utah during the Great Blizzard of 1899. Starving men, who have become outlaws, have hidden in the snowy mountains with their families awaiting amnesty from the governor. A group of bounty hunters, based in a small town called Snow Hill, are killing the outlaws for the rewards. As one of the bounty hunters notes, each man's bounty is small but they add up if you kill enough of them.

Klaus Kinski as a bounty hunter.

Enter a mute gunfighter known only as Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is willing to kill anyone for money. To avoid being pursued by the law, Silence only kills in self-defense--sometimes provoking his enemies to reach for their guns first. Silence helps out the outlaws and later accepts "payment" from a widow to kill her husband's murderer. Of course, Silence has his own agenda in Snow Hill—which is revealed as The Great Silence reaches its climax.

There are critics who hail The Great Silence as a political or anti-capital allegory. I'm not sure about that, because you could probably make similar claims about any number of Westerns pitting ranchers against settlers. I believe it's the setting and the ending that make The Great Silence stand out among other Spaghetti Westerns.

The film is seemingly bathed in white snow. I'm hard-pressed to think of a snowier movie, though perhaps the 1993 film version of Ethan Frome comes close. In both movies, the dark skies and the flat white drifts provide a blanket of bleakness. The characters wrap any available scrap of cloth around their faces to stay warm. The horses trudge through high snow, sometimes collapsing to the ground in exhaustion. It's a visually grim landscape that is perfect for the inevitable ending that lurks behind every frame of The Great Silence.

As for that ending, I won't include any spoilers in this review. Let's just say it's unconventional and was the reason that Richard Zanuck refused to release the movie in the U.S. To appease his producers, Corbucci shot two alternate endings, though it's possible that neither one was actually used.

Is The Great Silence a Spaghetti Western masterpiece? No. It lacks the vivid characters and splendid set pieces of Leone's films. It's missing the brutal passion that made Django memorable. Neither of those criticisms implies that it's not worth a viewing. 

Vonetta McGee as Pauline.

Klaus Kinski gives one of his best performances as one of the villains, a vile rascal who is surprisingly intelligent (e.g., he refuses to be provoked by Silence, knowing that he would lose a gunfight). And Vonetta McGee gives an quiet understated performance as the widow who hires Silence. She would later star in the equally unconventional Blaxploitation Western Thomsine & Bushrod (1974).

Django, The Great Silence, and The Specialists (1969) are sometimes referred to as Corbucci's  Mud and Blood Trilogy.