• U.S.

The New Pictures, Oct. 25, 1948

5 minute read
TIME

The Red 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 for one’s Art.

As in most movies that grapple with Art, the burden of the suffering falls on the audience, which is subjected to all the knitted brows, quivering nostrils, tossed locks—and tantrumacious bad manners—that cinemaddicts have learned to recognize as signs of artistic genius. The Red Shoes is such a spotty piece of movie craftsmanship that it is hard to believe that it is a major effort by Britain’s crack moviemaking team, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Colonel Blimp, I Know Where I’m Going”).

The 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 than on.

Johnny Belinda (Warner) is an odd, rather likable blend of believable back-country dramatics and old-fashioned melodramatics. It is set on Cape Breton Island, at the eastward tip of Nova Scotia. Its chief characters are a deaf-mute slavey named Belinda (Jane Wyman) and a kind-hearted young doctor (Lew Ayres).

Belinda is harshly treated by her father (Charles Bickford) and her aunt (Agnes Moorehead), and is generally regarded as a dimwit. Then the new doctor discovers her and teaches her sign language. She has scarcely begun to blossom when she is raped by the local Lothario (Stephen McNally). She gives birth to a baby, and refuses to name the father. Everyone assumes that the doctor is guilty and he has to leave town. But after a murder and a courtroom scene, everything turns out all right.

That is enough of Johnny Belinda to suggest that it is pretty turgid stuff. Also indicative of its savor is the name of Belinda’s father: Black McDonald. Yet the picture has many winning qualities. Jane Wyman plays the mute with sweetness and considerable skill. Mr. Ayres is modest and sympathetic. Mr. Bickford and Miss Moorehead do solid jobs of character acting. Stephen (formerly Horace) McNally is a vigorous personality and also a very good actor. In some stretches the picture is just well-sliced ham, but in others it is so good that it hardly seems possible the same crew made it.

Clearest instance of the picture’s split personality is the work of Cameraman Ted McCord. Perhaps a third of his shots are as pure, subtle and powerful as the whole of his Treasure of Sierra Madre—i.e., as good as the best in movies. Perhaps a fourth are ornate salon stuff (gnarled trees in silhouette, etc.), often mistaken for Art. The rest is high-grade Hollywood sound stage. It is not hard to believe that one cameraman is capable of all three kinds, but it is hard to understand why a man capable of the best could willingly put them all into one picture. That is the kind of movie Johnny Belinda is.

Apartment for Peggy (20th Century-Fox) takes a sentimental look at G.I. students and their brides, and finds them a cozy, uncomplicated lot. Like other young couples, they need better housing, larger incomes and babies. Unlike their contemporaries, they have a daily opportunity to find out what some of the great minds of the past have had to say about these needs.

So long as the story sets up problems for bouncy, pregnant Peggy (Jeanne Crain) and her glum G.I. husband (William Holden)—and answers their problems with advice from Socrates and Spinoza—Apartment for Peggy is a pleasant little movie flavored with idealism. Then it spills over into woman’s magazine fiction and some heavy bathos about a retired philosophy professor (Edmund Gwenn).

It turns out that the two men are utterly helpless ninnies. Without a woman’s guiding hand, they would doodle their lives away. Peggy’s husband is ready to swap his teaching career for a mess of lettuce; the professor wavers on the brink of suicide. Both are rescued from their weaker natural instincts by the gay, brave, ginghamed Little Woman.

This sop to the matinee trade undercuts some of the strongest human values in the film. The G.I. has a legitimate gripe: his allotment will not feed a gnat, let alone a healthy, expectant wife. The professor has been left on a shelf by loving friends and colleagues, to be dusted off at their convenience. Whenever these mistreated males threaten to let out a hearty, realistic beef about their grievances, Writer-Director George Seaton quickly smothers their growls under the suds.

* Among others, Danilova, Toumanova, Baronova and the late great Pavlova have done all right in ballet, though married.

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