A young dancer joins a prestigious ballet company and finds herself torn between satisfying the demands of its obsessive director and pursuing a relationship with an aspiring composer.
The Archers were a filmmaking team formed by Englishman Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (a Hungarian Jew who had fled Nazi Germany before the war, together responsible for 19 films over the course of 30 years. The pair dabbled in various genres such as romantic comedy, epic drama, fantasy, thriller, and experiments in the musical form. Using the clout acquired by past successes, The Red Shoes was their most artistically ambitious project to date.
Breaking with tradition, The Archers insisted on casting real dancers who could also act, instead of the other way around. In addition to using known figures from the ballet world, they also hired a complete unknown in the lead role (Moira Shearer). The loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's dark fairy tale that gives the film its title is featured as a "play within the play" in a 15-minute theatre sequence that is the film's climax. This unprecedented depiction of ballet on film would inspire dancer/actor/choreographer Gene Kelly to employ a similar structure in the film An American in Paris.
Despite their mostly new-to-film cast, Powell and Pressburger also worked with trusted previous collaborators, including legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff, actors Anton Walbrook and Marius Goring, composer Brian Easdale and painter Hein Heckroth, who for the first time was in charge of art direction.
While the film received little promotion, it slowly gained an audience and eventually became a huge success, playing for over two years straight in New York City. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Screenplay, and Editing, and won the Oscars for Art Direction-Set Decoration and Musical Score.
In 2000 The Red Shoes was named the 9th best British film ever made by the British Film Institute on their BFI 100 list. It has also been hugely influential to various filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, who considers it one of his absolute favorite films. Scorsese also spearheaded the recent restoration of the film and a new print was debuted in 2009.
Running time is approx. 2 hrs, 10 min.
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