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Deeply Moving, Part 1

Friday I'm In Love (With Ballet)... My friends Fernando & Sunil invited me Friday to Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater for the kick-off of a Michael Powell retrospective, which began with his classic "The Red Shoes." Introducing the series was none other than Martin Scorcese! "The Red Shoes" is a 1948 technicolor British valentine to dance and to artistic passion overall, centering on a Russian ballet company producing a ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale with a tragic ending. The movie's plot echoes this fairy tale, as the ballet's director Lermontov engineers the fairy-tale-like rise of a young ballerina and her star-crossed love with a young composer, also Lermontov's beneficiary. While I am not much of a ballet fan, I found the film to be totally engaging, and, as my Mom would say, deeply moving... At the time, "Red Shoes" was the most popular British film in US history, and ran for two years in exclusivity at NYC's Bijou Theater before starting a long nationwide run. Reportedly seeing the film was often a special mother-daughter outing.

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