1948 Brooklyn, New York

Karen Kondell

Born in 1943

Brooklyn or Far Rockaway (Queens), New York

Interviewed on 1/28

by Spencer Marks

The first movie I ever saw was The Red Shoes. I either saw it in Brooklyn or Far Rockaway, perhaps at an RKO Theater. The movie was made in 1948, but it was shown in New York for two years. So I’m not positive how old I was—I could have been anywhere from five to seven.

I’m guessing I saw the movie with my mother. Typically, I went by car to the movies with my mother or my friends. When you got off from school, or on weekends, going to the movies was a fun thing to do. But it was not quite a celebration. I’m sure I wore a skirt.

Every time I went to the movies I got Raisinets. After getting candy at the concessions stand, I remember ushers with flashlights leading you to the seat, there to make sure you were quiet. This was not a movie for children. It was a grown-up movie.

I remember newsreels before The Red Shoes. It was after the war, so what would they have been talking about? I remember seeing airplanes, but don’t have a specific memory.

The film was based on a fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson of the same name. In the fairytale, a shoemaker makes a pair of red slippers who puts them on, and she can’t stop dancing until she dies. The movie is about the ballet world, where this young woman is discovered and performs in a ballet called “The Red Shoes” which is written by a composer who she falls in love with. She becomes a star performing in the ballet, which tells the fairytale story.

The movie is in beautiful technicolor. During the ballet scene, which I remember taking up a large part of the film, the colors became much more subdued, and what stood out was the red in the shoes. The ballet scene was very fantasy-like–at one point, she dances with a newspaper, flying through the air. I loved it so much.

Eventually, the ballet director says to the ballerina that she can’t be in love and also dance; that ballet has to be her passion or she must leave it. My favorite line was when the director asks her why she wants to dance, and she asks him why he wants to live. For the ballerina, it was an obsession, but she had to make a choice between true love and her passion. She chooses to marry the composer and they are fired. Later, the director of the ballet gives her one more opportunity to put on her shoes, so she does and runs out of the theater to the train station and jumps onto the train tracks and is killed. Like in the fairytale, once you put on the shoes you have no choice but to keep dancing until you die. You can’t have this ballet obsession and human love.

You can see why I describe it as a tearjerker. It was very emotional and I sobbed as I left the theater. But I always liked movies where I cried, and I found The Red Shoes really touching.

Moira Shearer, who played the ballerina in the film, had been a ballerina in real life–not an actress. But she was a raving beauty with this gorgeous reddish hair. The composer was handsome and loving. The director of the ballet was strict and possessive. They were caricatures but you could just fall in love with them while they were falling in love with each other.

For years, I said it was the best, most wonderful movie. Much later in life, I found it on TV with my daughters and I told them they simply had to watch this most special movie. And we watched it and we thought it was terrible, so dated. It is still considered a classic movie, and I understand directors like Martin Scorsese and Coppola, Spielberg all think it is an amazing movie. I suppose my young reaction was more sophisticated than when I was a grown-up.