Monsters of the Marriage

If music lives on records, why does ballet die on film? Why has cinema in two-thirds of a century produced only one picture, The Red Shoes, in which the marriage of camera and choreography did not give birth to a monster? Three new monsters are currently caged in U.S. movie houses, and their presence offers a painful occasion to inspect and perhaps improve the breed.

Cinderella, the screen version of a three-act dance drama scored by Sergei Prokofiev and performed by Moscow's illustrious Bolshoi Ballet, is a big fat pumpkin of a production that desperately needs to be tapped by a magic wand. Balletically, the show has several left feet: both its choreography and its principals (Gennady Ledyakh and Raissa Struchkova) are full of high batterie but a bit obtuse. Cinematically, the show is a raging eyesore. Though filmed in Moscow's Gorky Studio, Cinderella is designed to suggest a photographed stage production. The palace looks like a set of canvas flats left over from one of Potemkin's villages, and when the camera comes within 30 feet the costumes start to look like dirty cheesecloth gone over with a glitter bomb. Furthermore, the picture was shot-sometimes out of focus--in a Russian process that yields a spectrum as subtle as a 29-c- crayon set.

Bolshoi Ballet 67, another Russian production, is unfortunately photographed in perfect focus. What the onlooker all too clearly sees is a soggy, discolored collection of Russkie zakuski: tidbits from half a dozen Bolshoi ballets (among them: Paganini, Giselle, The Stone Flower) served up by some dancers (among them: Natalia Bessmertnova, Nina Timofeyeva, Mikhail Lavrovjky) who seem superbly trained but profoundly dispirited--no doubt by the drivel they have to dance.

Two styles dominate Bolshoi Ballet 67. Style No. 1 is lace-hankie romanticism, a mood that proliferates poets with flowing manes, maidens with blowing veils, and violins that burst into orange flame. Style No. 2 is Hollywood 1934, a taste that makes customers over 40 wonder nervously when Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler will appear at the top of that 100-foot staircase and start singing Mister and Missus Is the Name.

Romeo and Juliet shows what Britain's Royal Ballet can do with good Russian music (Prokofiev) and a great Russian dancer (Rudolf Nureyev). Not much. Choreographer Kenneth Mac-Millan has attempted a compromise between dancing and acting that too often leaves the dancers with nothing to do but klutz around the stage like actors who have forgotten their lines. Director Paul Czinner has attempted almost nothing. With all of London's Pinewood Studios at his disposal, Czinner stolidly installed eight cameras in eight positions, and stolidly photographed a performance as eight members of the audience might see it--in gravy color.

Nevertheless, Romeo and Juliet should not be missed by anybody who cares to see genius shake a leg. The genius is Nureyev (TIME, April 16, 1965), who brilliantly reasserts his reputation as the finest male dancer since Nijinsky. In one incredible capriole he soars to his own height and hangs there like a flame in wind. Flame is the essence of his Romeo, a thing of melded fire and sinew, a tiger in tights.

All these pictures are valuable as archives--but not as art. Like most ballet films, they were made by men who know plenty about dance but almost nothing about film. The first thing these people have to learn is that a ballet cannot successfully be put on film until it has been radically rechoreo-graphed for the camera. What is required is a simple marriage of two modes of movement, and Red Shoes demonstrated that several million ballet buffs will support the normal offspring of such a marriage. No more monsters, please.

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