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133 4 If You Can Disregard the Plot The Red Shoes in an American Context ONE OF THE GREATEST ROAD-SHOW GROSSERS IN FILM HISTORY! Up to January 1st, 1950 “The Red Shoes” was seen by 10,000,000 people at $2.40! 64 Weeks in New York (and still running) 54 Weeks in Los Angeles (and still running) 53 Weeks in Chicago (and still running) 40 Weeks in Philadelphia 45 Weeks in Boston 21 Weeks in Washington 10 Weeks in Miami! One of the most widely pre-sold motion pictures in publicity history! Reproduced with this story is a cut of the by-now-famous “long legs” ad used for “The Red Shoes” campaign. These legs are the best known in the whole world of the motion picture today. —U.S. press book for The Red Shoes Hollywood films were representing the profession of ballet with considerable iconographic consistency by the late 190s, marking it as a form of highbrow art to which its practitioners were fanatically devoted and dedicated , their overriding ambition, whether male or female, to dance and keep dancing. But, as we have seen, often Hollywood’s ballet protagonists either danced not at all (Grand Hotel [1932], Days of Glory [19]), only a little (The Mad Genius [1931], Waterloo Bridge [190]), on “hastily tutored toes” (Maureen O’Hara in Dance, Girl, Dance [190], Margaret O’Brien in The Unfinished Dance [197]), or with the help of trained but uncredited dance doubles (The Men in 134 DY ING SWA NS A ND M A DMEN Her Life [191], Karin Booth in The Unfinished Dance). Without dancing, it was difficult for audiences to understand ballet as a form of art worthy of quasireligious devotion, extravagant dedication, and passionate attachment. Specter of the Rose (196) did star a “real” theatrical ballerina, Viola Essen, as a ballerina, but even she was not allowed to dance much, and arguably no brief ballet montage sequence could compete with a plot otherwise concerned with a psychotic knife-wielding hero and the suspense of whether he will kill his second ballerina wife as he apparently had his first. There was, however, no shortage of superb dancing, a lot of it balletbased , to be found in American film musicals of the 1930s and 190s. Lengthier dance interludes and dream ballets had become de rigueur in musicals with any kind of artistic pretensions at all following two theatrical events, the 1936 success of the Broadway musical On Your Toes, its “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” ballet choreographed by George Balanchine, and the success of Oklahoma! in 193, with its long “integrated” dream ballet, choreographed by Agnes de Mille. But not many of the longest dance interludes—five minutes or more—occurred in films that were financial successes. When Yolanda and the Thief, a Technicolor fantasy musical starring Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer, showed a net loss at the box office of $1,6,000 in 195, the failure was pinned on the film’s most obviously unusual elements, in particular its fifteen-minute-long “surrealist” ballet, which was choreographed by Eugene Loring.1 After another unconventional fantasy musical with a long ballet (directed, as had been Yolanda and the Thief, by Vincente Minnelli), The Pirate, starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, showed an even greater net loss—$2,290,000—after its release early in 198, studio heads could reasonably claim that while the movie public still liked musical comedies, it was much less fond of surreal fantasy musical films with long fantasy ballets.2 But at the same time, theatrical ballet itself had become a more popular and familiar presence across the United States during and after the war years. Ballet or “toe” was now being offered by most if not all of the dancing schools of small-town America, their students driven to emulate not only the famous dancers they saw on tour but the dancing stars they saw on their local movie screens. Smaller regional companies were flourishing, albeit on a comparatively minuscule scale, in cities ranging from Atlanta to Salt Lake City to San Francisco and Los Angeles in addition to New York and Chicago. During the war itself the big classical ballet companies also had brilliant seasons, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo full of actual as well as nominally Russian prima ballerinas and danseurs performing capsule versions of the romantic warhorses, works by Balanchine, and Agnes...

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