Re: Red Shoes

[kandb@ix.netcom.com (Ben Miller & Kris Lyons)]

Richard Evans wrote: 

>
>Did anybody see The Red Shoes - the movie recently ? Sunday night I think,
>on BBC2 in the early evening. I've videod it for future viewing but the big
>question is do I
>1) rush home and watch
>2) watch it at my leisure
>3) not bother
>
>Any comments on the film would be welcome.
>
>HNY2U
>
>richard
>
>

I've seen the Red Shoes a couple times and bits and pieces of it more often. I 
think it is a wonderful, beautiful movie.  Here is waht influmential American 
Film critic Pauline Kael had to say about it:


The most "imaginative" and elaborate backstage musical ever filmed, and many 
have called it great. The film contains a 14-minute ballet, also called "The Red 
Shoes," based on a Hans Christian Andersen story about a wicked shoemaker who 
sells an enchanted pair of slippers to a young girl. Delighted at first with the 
slippers in which she dances joyously, she discovers that the slippers will not 
let her stop dancing�and the bewitched, exhausted girl dies. The film's story 
is, of course, the same story, spelled out in more complicated terms, with the 
shoemaker of the ballet (L�onide Massine) replaced by the megalomaniac ballet 
impresario (Anton Walbrook). The exquisite young Moira Shearer is the ballerina; 
the cast includes Marius Goring as the young composer, Robert Helpmann, Albert 
Basserman, Ludmilla Tcherina, and Esmond Knight. Blubbery and self-conscious, 
but it affects some people passionately, and it's undeniably some kind of 
classic. Written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric 
Pressburger�master purveyors of high kitsch. Choreography by Helpmann; music by 
Brian Easdale; conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. 

"Copyright (c) 1993, Microsoft Corp." - from their excellent Cinemania CD-ROM.

Happy viewing,

Ben Miller
kandb@ix.netcom.com