About thirty years ago I travelled to Italy to interview an old film-maker who lived in a small village near Pisa. His name was Charles Hassé. He was a director and editor who had worked at the Crown Film Unit and Ealing Studios during the war. Although he had been involved in the making of some films that I am very fond of (Christmas Under Fire, for example, which can be seen on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGK5EsGzKIg), the most striking story he had to tell me concerned a film that in the end he did not make.
In 1943 his friend Alberto Cavalcanti, then a producer at Ealing Studios, asked Charles to direct a documentary about Margot Fonteyn, the prima ballerina of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. His research for the project, he recalled, had involved attending Fonteyn’s ballet performances and classes over a period of about a year. He had taken her out to lunch once or twice, but the relationship had been entirely businesslike and professional.
Then one night, he went around to her dressing-room with flowers, as he had done many times before. “She was taking her makeup off and looking into her mirror, and I saw her give me a look, which did a kick, which gave me a jolt. Something was between us.” That night they went to the Milroy Club in Mayfair, where they danced and then returned to his flat in Hammersmith Terrace for drinks. They just talked, but a few days later he received a call from Fonteyn at about two in the morning saying, “I can’t get you out of my mind.” It was the beginning of “a great affair”, he recalled. “She slept in my flat about three nights a week for two or three years.”
Charles Hassé’s film was abandoned after the D-Day landings in June 1944, because the Sadler’s Wells Ballet went on a tour for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) of liberated France and Belgium. The fact that the formidable director of the company, Ninette de Valois, had agreed to him making a film about her star dancer had been a surprise. He learned later that the reason why was her worry that Fonteyn was about to marry the brilliant musical director of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, Constant Lambert. “She somehow knew it would break up the marriage, which indeed it did.”
My long-ago visit to Charles Hassé’s house in the Etruscan countryside has the quality of a fairytale for me. Memory has transformed it into a magical experience that reminds me a little of Lermontov’s villa in The Red Shoes overlooking the Mediterranean, where we see Vicky climb up a long flight of steps to his house dressed like a fairytale princess about to meet her prince. And perhaps this visit to Italy explains why I prefer to think of The Red Shoes as a love story, although it is this aspect that is so often ignored in the seventy-five years of comments on the film.
Michael Powell provided a template for how most people seem to think about the film when he wrote in his memoirs, “The real reason why The Red Shoes was such a success, was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy … and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and die for art.”
In his film-essay on Powell and Pressburger, Made in England, Martin Scorsese commented: “The Red Shoes is a story of a girl torn between art and love. Vicky Page is an ambitious young ballerina who’s taken up by the great impresario Lermontov. But when she falls in love with the composer Julian Craster, her life gets ripped in two.” The implication is that Lermontov represents art as opposed to love.
“The Red Shoes is not about a love triangle,” observes Pamela Hutchinson in her recent book on the film (The Red Shoes, BFI Film Classics, 2023). The “supposed love triangle” is “only an illusion of romance” and “asexual”, she argues: it is Lermontov’s obsession with art that drives his wish to pull Vicky away from Craster. In his book Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (I.B Tauris, 2005), Andrew Moor takes the same line: “Lermontov is removed (almost) from human feelings ... He is a pure aesthete, the ‘high priest of art’.”
But I think much of the pathos of The Red Shoes lies in Lermontov’s failure to recognise his love for Vicky.
There is a point, about two-thirds of the way through the film, when he seems about to do so. Vicky’s performance in The Red Shoes has just been a triumphant success. She follows up with performances in a series of other ballets for Lermontov’s company. We see her dance in La Boutique fantasque, Coppélia and then Les Sylphides. Her performances are such a triumph that the general director of the Monte Carlo Theatre, Monsieur Boudin, even suggests that they build a bigger auditorium.
With this wider success, beyond The Red Shoes, Lermontov becomes more human. If previously, the entire focus of his life has been on his work, now there is a brief interlude where he can think about living, and maybe even loving. One evening Lermontov asks that a table for two be booked for him at La Réserve, the best restaurant on the French Riviera. He shuts his eyes as if he has been steeling himself to make a big decision.
But when Lermontov’s assistant Dimitri tries to make the arrangement with Vicky, she cannot be found. So instead Lermontov joins the rest of his company, who are celebrating the birthday of the company’s ballet master Grischa Ljubov. He is surprised to notice that Vicky is not there, and he is told that Julian is missing too. “Boris, we have a little romance in our midst,” his set designer Sergei Ratov explains.
Lermontov is shocked to learn that Julian and Vicky have been in love since working together on The Red Shoes. He has been too blind to see it. Now that he does see it, his response to such a painful revelation is not to recognise his own rival romantic feeling but to bury it more deeply. Earlier in the film, Ljubov had warned him that “you can’t alter human nature”, but Lermontov’s determination to ignore it now and to devote himself to the ballet, rejecting what he had once called “the doubtful comforts of human love”, takes on a demonic force.
Lermontov forces Craster out of the ballet company. He calls the new score Craster has composed “childish, vulgar and completely insignificant”, although the more clear-headed Ljubov tells him that it is “one of the finest scores we’ve ever had”. It is romantic jealousy that is driving him even if he is too enraged to acknowledge the fact. There was a possibility of love for Lermontov, but now he offers the tragic spectacle of a repressed, stunted human being whose worship of a false god causes him to lose his soul and ultimately kill the thing he loves.
The Red Shoes ballet, comments Scorsese, “is an ecstatic celebration of the glory of art but it also says that being an artist will destroy you”. I don’t think this is necessarily so, although art can certainly be dangerous if you cannot find a healthy relationship with it. This thought brings me back to Charles Hassé. In the photograph below, taken in the south of France soon after the war had ended, he can be seen (on the right-hand side of the picture) sitting next to Margot Fonteyn, enjoying with their friends the same Riviera life that is depicted in The Red Shoes.
Their relationship did not last much longer. Fonteyn left Charles in the summer of 1947 after having fallen in love with the young French dancer Roland Petit. It was, coincidentally, the same time as The Red Shoes was being made. “She’d got taken up by the French crowd,” Charles told Fonteyn’s biographer Meredith Daneman. “Dior was dressing her. Paris absolutely turned her head. She was very much wrapped up in herself after she left me. I so adored her. I don’t suppose I was much of a challenge, really.”
Much later Charles would be hurt not to receive a single mention in Fonteyn’s autobiography, but I don’t think he was so sorry that he did not get to make his film about her. It was much more important to him that they had been in love. And the fact that they had been was less an obstacle to art than a source for future inspiration. After all, pursuing love had not stopped Margot Fonteyn, a Prima Ballerina Assoluta, from becoming one of the greatest dancers of her time.
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