In The Seventh Veil and The Red Shoes both women have an exceptional talent which is essential to their life: for example, Francesca (Ann Todd), believing she can no longer play after an accident, says to Max ‘Why didn't you kill me?’ The women’s talent is recognised by an authoritarian man in a position of power (Lermontoff (Anton Walbrook), the head of the ballet company, in The Red Shoes and Nicholas (James Mason), Francesca’s guardian, in The Seventh Veil). While in their recognition of the characters’ passionate commitment to their art the films acknowledge that women can be talented and successful, it takes a man to identify, nurture and develop the women’s talents and to drive them on. The men have the expertise, the genius, the vision and ultimately the commitment. Moreover both Lermontoff and Nicholas seem to usurp the women’s talent to the extent that the women become vehicles, mere performers rather than artists. In The Red Shoes it is Lermontoff who will ‘make’ Vicki into one of the best ballerinas of all time. The story of The Red Shoes is significant here too since it is an allegory, in which wearing the red shoes which she so desires causes the ballerina to lose all control. They take over. She can dance anywhere, but she cannot stop dancing even when she is exhausted, and so eventually she dies. What appears to be freedom is actually the result of a man’s work (the shoe-maker) and under his control and then turns out to be a death sentence. For both Francesca in The Seventh Veil and Vicki, the price of realising their desire, fulfilling their destiny, is to be subject to an extreme form of male control and to agree to submit themselves totally to these men’s rule. Both women try to resist this control and in so doing incur the wrath and vengeance of their ‘masters’. More importantly both women, in resisting their masters, lose their opportunity to realise their dream. They cannot do it alone. Both women’s attempts to resist patriarchal control involve them going off with a younger, less authoritarian man who is also an artist. Significantly, neither of the men’s artistic careers are threatened by romance nor are either of the men dependent on a ‘master’, thus subtly suggesting that it is not being an artist that is a problem, but being a woman artist. This is most clear in The Red Shoes when Lermontoff forces Vicki to choose between dancing and romance when she falls in love with Julian (Marius Goring). Lermontoff’s view is that romance and a career are incompatible, for women. Indeed early on in the film he sacks Irina, the previous prima ballerina, because she is planning to marry.
Tessa Perkins, “Two weddings and two funerals: the problem of the post-war woman,” in Nationalising femininity: culture, sexuality, and British cinema in the Second World War (eds. Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson)
