Ickenham – The Red Shoes (1948)

The Red Shoes (1948) | Ickenham

‘The red shoes which Judy Garland clicks together, making her wish in the Land of Oz, bring GOOD LUCK – for they transport her home to Kansas. But the red shoes of Michael Powell’s film dance Moira Shearer to her death.’

Derek Jarman, devotee of Powell and Pressburger’s films, wrote this in his book ‘Chroma: A book of colour’ published in 1993. His book came out at around the same time that Jarman made ‘Blue’, a single shot of a saturated blue screen to the music of – among others – COIL, and to Jarman’s spoken reflections on colour. Jarman’s eyesight was fading due to complications of HIV AIDS. Powell also lost his vision towards the end of his life.

Mostly filmed at Pinewood Studios in nearby Buckinghamshire, other locations for ‘The Red Shoes’ in London include the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and The Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate. ‘The Red Shoes’ is a love triangle between Moira Shearer, her impressario and admirer played by Anton Walbrook, and Marius Goring. Caught between her love for a man and her passion for the ballet, she chooses neither. An obvious influence on Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’, Martin Scorcese has argued that along with Jean Renoir’s ‘The River’ ‘The Red Shoes’ is the most beautiful colour film ever made.

As London’s Metroland expanded from 1905, the little village of Ickenham became an attractive spot for sight-seers from the city. Flower-sellers set up their stalls by the new railway platform. The colour of flowers attracted bees. Sunlight which fed horticulture also brought film-makers to nearby Pinewood and to other leafy locations around London where film studios sprang up.

Initially, film-makers came to escape the smog and for the sunlight. Early film production had no electrical lighting. In order to capture shadows on strips of plastic, film production relied on greenhouses similar to those which the market gardening industry used to collect and focus the light of the Sun. Later, film studios stayed in these leafy locations for the peace, quiet and the attractive surroundings. London has always been a collection of villages. It’s to the far North West and East, away from the airport and the docks, that this sense of London as a village continues.

Red means life, sexuality, reproduction; red also means spilled blood. Signals passed at red. Stop. Danger. Death. Hans Christian Andersen got the idea for his children’s story of a vain young woman’s red shoes – shoes that carry on dancing, even after she’s chopped her feet off – from a customer who brought his father, a cobbler, some special red silk. Andersen senior mixed the silk with red leather but the customer was displeased with the results, saying he’d ruined her silk. Andersen’s father chopped the shoes up with his scissors before the rich woman’s eyes.

In MGM’s 1939 film of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ the Wicked Witch’s silver shoes that Dorothy acquires were swapped for ruby slippers, a more striking use of the then-new technicolour film process. In Baum’s book (it’s been argued) the Yellow Brick Road is the Gold Standard. Silver shoes represent the political views of the Silverites, 1890s equivalent of Corbynistas arguing for a People’s Quantitative Easing. Silverites were strongest in the new territories of the West, were often linked to silver mining interests and the railroad lobby. Silver was a crucial component in the manufacture of early film stock. In 1914-15 Baum founded an early Hollywood studio, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company in the sunlight-rich farms of the Los Angeles basin, but it was unsuccessful.

In 1785, after the Spanish had first settled L.A., a 25 year old indigenous medicine woman – Toypurina – led an unsuccessful rebellion. Photographic film stock and colour processes built modern Los Angeles, turning Toypurina and her Tongva—Gabrieliño people – the original inhabitants of Hollywood – into a footnote to American mythology while Baum’s Dorothy will last forever.