Moira Shearer makes a dancer’s ambition believable before anyone has explained it. We would recommend The Red Shoes even to ballet sceptics: her precision and assurance make the work matter, despite the script’s fondness for grand declarations.
Fi1m perspective
In The Red Shoes (1948), Moira Shearer makes Victoria Page’s ambition credible simply by dancing. Anton Walbrook’s Boris Lermontov has the conviction to make his demands persuasive, but Shearer’s assurance keeps Victoria from disappearing beneath his opinions. We believe that she has something worth protecting, which makes his possessiveness more alarming. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger give her enough time in performance for us to understand why she might put up with him.
The Red Shoes was her film debut, made after she had established herself as a ballerina. The early screen roles made use of that skill: she returned to Powell and Pressburger as Stella and Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). After retiring from ballet in 1953, she continued acting on stage and in films, and played Vivian for Powell in Peeping Tom (1960). We would resist separating the dancer from the actor, though, because Victoria’s movement is already doing so much of the storytelling.
The central ballet in The Red Shoes shows how much she can carry without speech. We were frightened by the way her dancing stayed precise while the space around her became increasingly unreal. Reginald Mills’s editing lets us follow her movement through those changes, while Brian Easdale’s score holds the passage together without reassuring us. Shearer herself found filming in short stretches difficult, an awkward practical limit that the finished sequence conceals. Her performance never seems to become a collection of poses, and we remain concerned for the person inside it.
The dialogue in The Red Shoes is less helpful to her. Powell and Pressburger’s declarations about art sometimes sound too grand for conversation, and the romantic scenes with Marius Goring’s Julian Craster labour to explain Victoria’s choice. Goring keeps the personal stakes clear, but we sometimes want the film to let Shearer move again. The reservation is with a script that explains feelings she has already made understandable. Start with The Red Shoes, even if ballet has never interested you.
Biography
Moira Shearer (17 January 1926 – 31 January 2006) was a Scottish ballet dancer and actress. Born Moira Shearer King in Dunfermline, Fife, she trained at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School and danced with the International Ballet and Sadler’s Wells Ballet, becoming a principal ballerina and performing leading roles in classical works such as The Sleeping Beauty and Giselle.
Shearer made her screen debut as Victoria Page in the Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes (1948). She appeared in further films including The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) and Peeping Tom (1960), and on stage in productions such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1954) and Major Barbara (1956). She retired from ballet in 1953 but continued acting into the 1960s. In 1950 she married writer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy.
