Moira Shearer
So, Moira Shearer has finally 'taken off the red shoes'. I confess I was amazed to learn that she was still alive. The Red Shoes (1948), in which she starred at the age of 21, seems to belong not just to another age, but almost another world, and she did not appear in many other films. One of the muses of director Michael Powell, she also appeared as the victim of a serial killer in Powell's career-ending Peeping Tom (1960). I always found that bit of casting particularly disturbing: it was like casting Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn as the victim in a slasher flick. But then, I suppose that's just the unsettling effect that Powell was aiming at.
If I had to pick a single scene to commemorate her by, it would be that wonderful scene in The Red Shoes, in which she is summoned to the Monte Carlo villa of the impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), to be offered the part in his new ballet of 'The Red Shoes'. Most of Powell's films are fairy tales, in one way or another: either directly (Tales of Hoffman, A Matter of Life and Death), or as fairy tales that somehow bleed into real life (TRS), or as stories of charmed 'worlds apart', where a different reality holds sway (Black Narcissus, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going).
The moment when Vicky (Shearer) goes to Lermontov's villa presents an almost Surrealist change of mood, in a film which up to this point has been a romantic, lighthearted backstage drama. Dressed in a ballgown and wearing a regal tiara (in the middle of the afternoon!), she is diverted from a dinner engagement by a chauffeur bearing Lermontov's summons. She is driven to the gate of an apparently abandoned villa high in the hills above Monte Carlo. A vast stone stairway rises before her, thick with weeds. She slowly mounts the stairs, to appropriately eerie music. (At this point, a blooper occurs which should wreck the moment, but somehow doesn't: one of the reflectors being used to fill in the shadows slips, and a square of errant sunlight skids across the scene.)
Once inside, the previous mood of the film resumes. But this is the pivot-point. Vicky has entered the world of the fairytale, and something has been set in motion which will lead inexorably to that moment when she reaches the fatal limit to which the Red Shoes have dragged her. For many years, one of my personal favourite movie last-lines has been the one Vicky utters, to her lover: "Take off the red shoes".
So, Moira Shearer has finally 'taken off the red shoes'. I confess I was amazed to learn that she was still alive. The Red Shoes (1948), in which she starred at the age of 21, seems to belong not just to another age, but almost another world, and she did not appear in many other films. One of the muses of director Michael Powell, she also appeared as the victim of a serial killer in Powell's career-ending Peeping Tom (1960). I always found that bit of casting particularly disturbing: it was like casting Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn as the victim in a slasher flick. But then, I suppose that's just the unsettling effect that Powell was aiming at.
If I had to pick a single scene to commemorate her by, it would be that wonderful scene in The Red Shoes, in which she is summoned to the Monte Carlo villa of the impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), to be offered the part in his new ballet of 'The Red Shoes'. Most of Powell's films are fairy tales, in one way or another: either directly (Tales of Hoffman, A Matter of Life and Death), or as fairy tales that somehow bleed into real life (TRS), or as stories of charmed 'worlds apart', where a different reality holds sway (Black Narcissus, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going).
The moment when Vicky (Shearer) goes to Lermontov's villa presents an almost Surrealist change of mood, in a film which up to this point has been a romantic, lighthearted backstage drama. Dressed in a ballgown and wearing a regal tiara (in the middle of the afternoon!), she is diverted from a dinner engagement by a chauffeur bearing Lermontov's summons. She is driven to the gate of an apparently abandoned villa high in the hills above Monte Carlo. A vast stone stairway rises before her, thick with weeds. She slowly mounts the stairs, to appropriately eerie music. (At this point, a blooper occurs which should wreck the moment, but somehow doesn't: one of the reflectors being used to fill in the shadows slips, and a square of errant sunlight skids across the scene.)
Once inside, the previous mood of the film resumes. But this is the pivot-point. Vicky has entered the world of the fairytale, and something has been set in motion which will lead inexorably to that moment when she reaches the fatal limit to which the Red Shoes have dragged her. For many years, one of my personal favourite movie last-lines has been the one Vicky utters, to her lover: "Take off the red shoes".
posted by cuckoo at
12:05 PM
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