The Red Shoes (not rated)
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 1948 (27 years before I was born). I first saw it in 2019. It begins with a group of college students going to an opera house to watch a ballet, because its score had been composed by their teacher, Professor Palmer. However, one of the students, Julian Craster, soon realizes that Palmer had stolen Julian's own compositions. The head of the ballet company, Boris Lermontov, attends a party hosted by a patron of the arts named Lady Neston. She wants her niece, Victoria Page, to perform a dance for Lermontov at the party, but he has no interest in watching an "audition." But he meets Vicky anyway, and invites her to a company rehearsal. Later, Julian shows up at Lermontov's office, hoping to take back a letter he'd sent about Palmer's plagiarism of his music, before Lermontov could read it. However, Lermontov had already read it, and after hearing Julian play another of his compositions on the piano, invites him to join the company as an assistant conductor.

At the rehearsal, Julian and Vicky both show up, and both are quickly disillusioned by the apparent fact that Lermontov hasn't told anyone in the company about either of them. But they do both end up working for the company. Eventually, Lermontov tasks Julian with rewriting the score of a ballet the company will be performing, "The Red Shoes" (based on the Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name, which I haven't read). And he makes Vicky the star of the show. Now that Julian and Vicky are working directly together, they become friends, and soon fall in love. They were hiding this from Lermontov, I guess, because he doesn't like the idea of dancers falling in love. Ostensibly this is because it prevents them from giving their full attention to their craft. Same goes for composers, I guess. Although I'm not sure if that was really his problem. Earlier in the film, his former lead dancer, Irina Boronskaya, had left the company to get married. And it's possible he was genuinely upset about that for the company's sake, though I also think it's possible he might have had a romantic interest in Irina. I'm really not sure. And the same can be said in the current situation. I'm not sure if he was upset for the company's sake about Vicky and Julian, or if he was jealous because he had a romantic interest in her. Some might say it's perfectly clear it was the latter, but personally I don't feel like that's made truly explicit. In any event, he's upset. I also want to say that the first time he watches Vicky dance (while Julian is conducting), he reminded me of the jilted boyfriend from the Kinks' Come Dancing video. But maybe that's just me.

Lermontov ends up firing Julian, and that leads to Vicky quitting. I don't want to spoil anything that happens after that point. But I will say it's an interesting film. Particularly the scene where we see the "Red Shoes" ballet being performed. There were some visual effects that obviously couldn't have been done live on stage, which seemed strange to me. But eventually I remembered Vicky and Julian having talked earlier about imagining things during upcoming the performance, so I figured what we're seeing in the movie must be meant to represent what Vicky and/or Julian are imagining, not what the ballet's audience is actually seeing. So that was kind of a neat touch. Also, I couldn't help but think that Lermontov himself was sort of the personification of the red shoes in the story, in the way he tried to control Vicky. And I guess that's all I can think to say. Except of course that the dancing and music are good.