Ballet Rambert On the Films

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 90, 3 September 1948, Page 3

Ballet Rambert On the Films

Joyce Howard stars with Douglass Montgomery in British National’s film, “Woman to Woman”, which tells of the romance of a French ballet dancer with a Canadian officer. When Producer Louis H. Jackson cast Joyce for the role of the dancer Nicole, he was thinking of her primarily as an actress—the part is a big and dramatic one—however,, during their interview he discovered that she had studied ballet from early childhood and had on two occasions performed before Their Majesties. This was ideal, of course, and Joyce is seen in two ballet sequences in the picture. One of these is the macabre “Death and the Maiden”, danced by the Ballet Rambert, which also presented this ballet recently on their tour throughout New Zealand. On the stage this talented company performed the ballet against a plain backcloth, but in the film the setting is an imaginative one in sombre greys and black, showing a deep valley traversed by a curving bridge. The valley is filled with menacing black firs and skeleton trees in white which seem to stretch out bony fingers. “The Death and the Maiden” ballet is danced to the music of the slow movement from Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor.