David Hast: Scott, have you seen The Red Shoes?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen The Red Shoes, the 1948 movie by Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger, and quite impressed by it. I had not seen it until we had decided to do a conversation about Powell and Pressburger, and it blew me away.
DH: Like many people listening to our show, you had never seen anything by Powell and Pressburger, right?
SVW: I had never seen anything, I'd seen some of the Michael Powell films later from the 60s, but not anything from their collaboration.
DH: Yeah, and there is a strong argument, I'm on this side, that Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger are the greatest British filmmakers ever.
SVW: So you would say even greater than David Lean, who we talked about the previous show.
DH: Yes, I would. They made a series of films in, it's funny that when you talk about the golden age of Hollywood, we're typically talking about the 30s and 40s and into the 50s, right? But I was just reading up on this. When they talk about the golden age of British cinema, often they're just meaning the 1940s, which is kind of weird because there are lots of great movies like in the 50s, all those Ealing comedies with Alec Guinness and such. But they made, the team of Powell and Pressburger, basically started in 1941 and made a movie a year in the 1940s. And you could argue that a good six or seven of them are masterpieces.
SVW: And the other films that I've seen are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp from 1943 and Black Narcissus 1947. And along with The Red Shoes, these are in color, in technicolor. There are a number of them, obviously, that are in black and white, and I have yet to see those. And you believe that those are great movies as well?
DH: Yeah, I mean, they, you know, I said it, they started in ‘41 and they made a number of black and white films. It's interesting that when they first started, I mean, this was, they started making movies when World War I (WWII) was starting, when the Blitz was going on and in London was being bombed daily. And just like in the United States and in Hollywood, they made the films narrative, dramatic feature films. Also, if they were about the war in any way, they also had a sort of propaganda side to them. Hollywood participated in creating an image and a politics for the American people and it described why we're fighting. You know?
SVW: And you can see that really in 1943 with the life and death of Colonel Blimp as well.
DH: Yeah, but before that they made a movie called The Spy in Black about a German U-boat trying to sabotage the British fleet. They made a movie called 49th Parallel about Nazis landing in Canada. In fact, that movie, its propaganda point was to try to get the American viewers to see it and be convinced that the United States should get in the war.
SVW: When we think of great auteurs and great directors, we always think of one individual. How did they become a partnership?
DH: Yeah, they're one of these great partnerships. There are two guys that they were working together on a movie when a one Powell was already an established director in England, although not not… he's mostly doing kind of like B pictures. And so he was British born. He was a director who I mean, he started working in silent film. Pressburger was a Hungarian Jew who left Hungary to escape the Nazis, and he was a writer. So, what's interesting about them is all their movies always say on one credit screen, written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger. But in fact, of those three things, what they did was they produced them together. Pressburger wrote the script. Powell had some input, but Pressburger wrote, and Powell directed. But their movies are, they're just so original. They're just stunningly visual. They show the best that cinema has to offer in production design, cinematography, the way they shoot faces. They have starkly realistic stuff, almost documentary-like that added to some of their propaganda value and stuff. They really, and in fact, some of their movies are shot on locations and they use documentary-type footage like movies, a couple movies they shot on Scottish Islands The Edge of the World and I Know Where I'm Going and yet mixed in with his realism is is a really romantic worldview and I don't by romantic I don't just mean you know romance like between a couple. I mean like the romantic movement, right….?
SVW: …of poetry and theater and painting and one of the things about the red shoes. It's so amazing is just how gorgeous and how dreamlike it is.
DH: Yeah, tell me what you like, because the red shoes of all their films, if you've, for our listeners, if you can only see one Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger film, it's gotta be The Red Shoes. Many people consider it one of the greatest movies ever made.
SVW: And a lot of people have said that it's the greatest dance movie ever made.
DH: And it changed all dance movies, all dance that came afterwards in movies.
SVW: And it's really about two young people and a director or impresario. who has a theater company…
DH:… a ballet company…
SVW: and uh... the young couple are uh... a composer and a dancer and it's really the how they come together, their relationship with the ballet director who is very controlling but it's based on the core of it is The Red Shoes by Hans Christian Anderson so the old fable, and in in the end there's a ballet within the movie, it's about this company creating this original ballet around Hans Christian Anderson called The Red Shoes and it's developing it and then performing it and then it's also how the relationships progress between the various characters around that performance
DH: Yeah so, it's and it's like a story within a story right because and this is not a spoiler because they tell you the story of the red shoes in the movie. The story of The Red Shoes is a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and Andersen’s fairy tales were pretty dark. A little girl gets a pair of magical red shoes from a witch or from some, in the movie version it's like a kind of magical cobbler who makes shoes. These shoes help her to dance, and she dances and dances and dances better than she's ever danced before but she can't stop dancing. The shoes won't let her stop. And she dances until she dies. And so, this company is making a ballet of it, and yet the movie is called The Red Shoes, and it's about this dancer and about the people she encounters. And so the whole movie is like a metaphor, an extended metaphor for the story. And like you said, then they just do the ballet. They do the whole story from beginning to end in 15 minutes, but it's like the movie, there's no dialogue, There's no cutting away from it. They just do a 15-minute ballet That's one of the most beautiful things that's ever been done in a movie.
SVW: It's amazing and the around that is the company traveling From the UK going into Europe you see gorgeous landscape photography, I know beautiful buildings, architecture, they're traveling around and then they perform this ballet and it's almost I don't want to say surreal, that's probably not the correct term, but it's this dreamlike quality. The color is amazing. The way that they edit it, the choreography is wonderful. And it seems almost like it could be, you know, you're watching a movie from today.
DH: Yeah. I mean, because they influence so much today, later on, but yeah, it can't be emphasized enough. It's not like all of a sudden you're sitting in, in an audience watching a ballet on a stage. It's very much a cinematic ballet just like you said, with all this startling visual imagery, dreamlike, surreal imagery. The production design, the cinematography, all of it, it was immediately influential on, musicals were huge in the United States and it was immediately influential. So when they did An American in Paris and Singing in the Rain, all of those had extended dance sequences. None of that had ever been done in movies before, but when Powell and Pressburger did it, the Americans copied it.
SVW: Definitely you should check out a Michael Powell and Emmerich Press Burger.
DH: Yes. Thank you Scott.
SVW: Thank you
