Anton Walbrook gives controlling men enough charm and conviction to make their approval matter. We rate him especially highly in The Red Shoes, where his belief in ballet makes his possessiveness all the more frightening.
Fi1m perspective
In The Red Shoes (1948), Anton Walbrook makes being taken seriously by Boris Lermontov seem worth the trouble of working for him. He believes in ballet so completely that his demands cannot simply be written off as a bully’s whims. We found him frightening because we could understand the wish to please him. A performance built only on cruelty would have made the choice easy. Walbrook is superb here because his possessiveness grows out of a devotion we believe.
He had played romantic leads in German and Austrian sound films in the 1930s, and that charm remained useful when the parts became harsher. Thorold Dickinson gives that elegance a cruel use in Gaslight (1940), with Walbrook as the sadistic husband Paul Mallen. The sympathetic German officer of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) puts that controlled manner to a kinder use.
Powell and Pressburger get the most from him in The Red Shoes by allowing Lermontov’s belief in his own judgement to meet a convincing dancer. Shearer’s assurance as Victoria matters as much as Walbrook’s intensity: her dancing gives us a reason to understand why his attention is tempting. The film shows what the discipline can produce before asking how much authority one person should be allowed over another. The dialogue sometimes sounds too impressed by its own seriousness, and Walbrook’s conviction has to do more work than it should. But Victoria never becomes merely the person listening to him, which keeps his forcefulness from exhausting the film.
The move into Ophüls’ films in the 1950s gave his elegance other uses. In La Ronde (1950), he is the master of ceremonies; Lola Montès (1955) casts him as the ageing king of Bavaria. The charm and melancholy belong as naturally to these parts as the arrogance does to Lermontov. Start with The Red Shoes, and pay attention to how readily we understand why a dancer would want his approval.
Biography
Anton Walbrook was an Austrian actor, born Adolf Anton Wilhelm Wohlbrück in Vienna on 19 November 1896. He worked in Austrian and German theatre and film before leaving Germany in 1936. He settled in the United Kingdom, where he adopted the name Anton Walbrook and appeared in British cinema.
Walbrook is known for his roles in films including Gaslight (1940), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) as Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, The Red Shoes (1948) as Boris Lermontov, and La Ronde (1950). He also played Prince Albert in Victoria the Great (1937). He died on 9 August 1967 in Bavaria, West Germany.
