RED ENVELOPES: Miss Page Will Not Perform Tonight

When casting the pivotal role of Vicky in The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger stumbled into one of those fantastically perfect situations where you get just the right actor for the right role. Like Christopher Reeve in Superman, or Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, where the actor so thoroughly inhabits the part that the role and the actor become inseparable. So it was that Powell & Pressburger chanced upon a flame-haired ballerina from Scotland named Moira Shearer.

Shearer passed away on Tuesday, but if ever someone can be said to live on through her work, it's her indelible performance in The Red Shoes that immortalizes her. Very few films have even attempted to capture ballet on celluloid, but this movie manages to make the art form seem rapturous and inviting, even as the underlying theme would seem to warn you away forever.

The plot revolves around a tyrannical ballet company manager (Anton Walbrook, perpetually on the verge of exploding), who promotes Shearer as his new prima ballerina, preparing an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes" as her showcase. While preparing for the piece's debut, she spends a great deal of time with the composer (a passable Marius Goring), and the two eventually fall in love. The ballet is a smash, and Shearer is acclaimed, but Walbrook is so jealous that he fires Goring. Shearer leaves to be with her new husband, but agrees to a return performance. Forced to choose between her lover and her love of dance, she cannot decide, and her red ballet slippers take over, driving her to her death (in much the manner of the shoes in the Andersen story).

It's one of the all-time bummer endings, and especially in light of the exuberant tone that has preceded it. The film effectively captures the atmosphere of a collection of artists, with their petty complaints and irrepressible camraderie. Thought we meet a host of important figures in the company (the ballet master, the conductor, the set designer, the departing star), we're not overwhelmed. The sense of family, with Walbrook as the stern father, is pre-eminent.

And then there's the ballet. Even today, studio executives would probably have a coronary at the mere thought of devoting at least a quarter of the running time of a movie to a complete ballet. But "The Red Shoes" is the very core of The Red Shoes, and it is fantastic. It's a unique creature of the cinema, with special effects and dreamy interludes impossible to accomplish on the stage. Critic Danny Peary argues that this takes you completely out of the story, but I think there's a very clear line between the ballet being performed by these characters and the ballet we're actually witnessing. I have no particular love of or appreciation for ballet, but I find this particular ballet fascinating.

Another big draw is the magnificent cinematography of Jack Cardiff. Filmed in lush three-strip technicolor, The Red Shoes has an incredibly rich palette, drawing you into both the stunning French Riviera locations and the decorated ballet stage. Along with another Cardiff masterpiece, the darker Black Narcissus (which is hovering near the top of my Netflix queue), this is a film that would be a sterling achievement for its' look alone.

In the center of it all is Shearer, who is every bit the spitfire her appearance suggests. We first meet her as Walbrook is giving her the brushoff. But she stands up to him, and charms her way into his company. Then, when we see her first real ballet performance, we see exactly what Walbrook does: a star in the making.

The ending is tragic, of course, and almost cruel. The two men in Vicky Page's life have put her in an impossible situation, but it hardly seems fair to make her pay for it with her life (except to punish them, so everybody loses). But it is Walbrook's memorable curtain speech that cues the waterworks. As he nearly shrieks each word, as though trying to command his own grief into submission, he introduces the heartrending sight of "The Red Shoes" with no ballerina at all. The characters in the film know the same thing that we do, that no one else could ever dance "The Red Shoes". Only Vicky Page. Only Moira Shearer.