THE RED SHOES

"Why do you want to dance?" "Why do you want to live?"--THE RED SHOES

This morning I helped Father trim the branches from the trees that were too close to our southern neighbors' house.  When I help Father with something, what tends to happen is that he does most of the work while I stand around waiting for something to do. (Like a government project.)

In the evening I saw Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's THE RED SHOES at the Event Screen, the latest Film 101 event hosted by Murray Pomerance.  It's about three artists--Diaghilev-like impresario Anton Walbrook, composer Marius Goring and ballerina Moira Shearer--coming together to create a ballet based on the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Red Shoes," the one about a girl who can't take off her magical dancing shoes and gets danced to death.  It's also about the first two artists' pissing match over the third. (Frankly, being married to Goring doesn't look like a barrel of fun.)

Brilliantly photographed by Jack Cardiff, it's a visual triumph.  And it's an earful as well as an eyeful:  I liked the parallel between the ballet's frenzied dance music and the train engine noise foreshadowing Shearer's fate.  But the message of art as an "all or nothing" proposition that doesn't allow compromise struck me as a bit silly.