Word: ballets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Shoes (J. Arthur Rank; Eagle Lion) is a lingering, calf-eyed look at backstage ballet's little world of overworked egos and underdone glands. Its theme is one of fiction's most moth-eaten: one must suffer...
...plot moons over the rise of a young ballerina (Moira Shearer) and a young composer (Marius Goring) in Impresario Anton Walbrook's celebrated ballet troupe. Having spent what seems like a feature-length lifetime in making the two youngsters famous, it runs them afoul of the impresario's deadpan dictum that marriage makes a career in ballet impossible...
Except for pretty, red-haired Moira Shearer, the film is not very fortunate in its performers. Miss Shearer, a ballet dancer appearing in her first movie, is an attractive actress who looks wonderful in tights. The dancing, featuring Leonide Massine and Robert Helpmann as both choreographers and performers, is proficient. But, during the longest ballet sequence, the badly inflamed Technicolor will not make the picture any more exciting to balletomanes. People who don't much care for the ballet to begin with may conclude from The Red Shoes that ballet folk are a more tiresome lot of exhibitionists offstage...
...middle of his performance. Once, during rehearsal, he became so enraged that he strode over to a violinist, snatched his violin, and crashed it over his head. He fought with his prima ballerina and when her fellow dancers stuck by her, he conducted Die Fledermaus without any ballet. Once he had to be searched out in a café minutes before curtain time...
Symptomatic of current French political developments was the interruption of a charming ballet number by Mare Alexandre, Jean Cotillon, and Linda Cabot '51, with a Russian kazatzki by one of the disguised males of the trio...