I've never taken dance classes but I sure love movies about dancers. Vicky (Moira Shearer) dreams of being a prima ballerina. She is eventually asked to join the chorus of renown ballet master Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). When Lermontov's prima ballerina (Ludmilla Tcherina) leaves the company to get married, he turns his eye to Vicky, deciding that she should star in his new ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, The Red Shoes. But when she falls in love with the new conductor (Marius Goring), Lermontov issues his ultimatum: she can dance or she can get married but she can't have both.
Movies like this must have felt so prescient for women at the time. You could go to school and get a job but it was with the understanding that you were just doing it until you found a husband. After that, you had to be a housewife and mother like God and Eisenhower intended. I wish I could say that kind of mentality was as dead as the Edsel but that assumption was the main reason for my divorce in 2005. Maybe there are women out there who would love nothing more than to sit at home all day and clean but I am not one of them.
That, more than anything, dated this movie for me. The dancing is lovely, the costumes are fabulous but the story is too old school for me to enjoy it as much as I would have liked. Still, the version I saw was a Criterion Collection so the transfer was superb. I didn't take a look at the special features but I would encourage anyone everyone else to do so.
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