The Red Shoes - Special Edition [DVD] [1948]

Overall, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 tale of the tragic ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) is not in the top drawer of their achievements. The backstage wranglings offer insufficient scope for their usual cinematic vision (though the Monte Carlo scenes are prettily sumptuous). Page's central dilemma, meanwhile, is a bit on the trite side--she must choose between love for a young composer and her career under stern taskmaster Boris Lertomov (Anton Walbrook), the ballet company impresario. The climax is also risibly melodramatic, a rare fumble for Powell and Pressburger. That said, The Red Shoes is worth purchasing alone for its middle sequence, a fantasy cinematic setting of the ballet of The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a girl who dances herself to death. A superb score by Brian Easdale is matched by an impossibly elaborate, shifting backdrop in which all of Powell and Pressburger's sense of drama, colour, invention and the super-real is encapsulated in one small but intensely concentrated dose. While the rest of the film is relatively dispensable, the ballet scene bears up to repeated rewindings.--David Stubbs

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's most celebrated Technicolor fairy-tale, The Red Shoes is both metaphor and melodrama of unparalleled boldness. So extravagantly theatrical a movie was regarded as simply unreleasable by the Rank Organisation back in 1948, but in spite of their attempted suppression it has long since been acknowledged as one of British cinema's landmark achievements. Not only were Powell and Pressburger unorthodox enough to populate the cast with real ballet dancers (including the radiant Moira Shearer in the pivotal role), they built the whole film around an extraordinarily daring 17-minute ballet sequence in which the camera moves from outside the proscenium arch into a subjective whirl of impressionistic images inspired and informed by Brian Easdale's marvellous score. Only after seeing this, so the story goes, was Gene Kelly able to see how he could make An American in Paris.

The melodramatic plot, metaphorically acted out in the "Red Shoes Ballet" then re-enacted for real by the main characters, presents Great Art as something worth dying for, and, in the person of Anton Walbrook's Lermontov, gives us a portrait of the artist as a man for whom anything and everything is worth sacrificing in its pursuit. Loosely based on Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, Walbrook's magnetic central performance is of sufficient stature to conceal the rather trite predicament of his ballerina protégée, and the film's contrived, over-the-top tragic ending.

On the DVD: Sadly for a film in which music is such a central element, the advertised digital remastering doesn't seem to have extended to the mono soundtrack, which shows its age quite badly. The colour print, however, looks very vibrant. This special edition also includes a new 25-minute "making-of" feature with a few comments from crew members (or their relatives) and admirers of the film, including ballerina Darcey Bussell. "The Ballet of the Red Shoes" can be seen on its own in a separate featurette, and there are text biographies and a trailer.--Mark Walker

Bonus features on this special edition The Red Shoes DVD include: the "A Profile of The Red Shoes" documentary (25 mins); "The Ballet of The Red Shoes" featurette; Biographies; a behind the scenes stills gallery; English Hard of Hearing subtitles; and a theatrical trailer.

The Red Shoes is a seminal ballet film which deftly combines interpretive dance with drama. This critically acclaimed adaptation of a Hans Christian Anderson fairy-tale results in a marked triumph of artistic collaboration and modernity. More than any other film, The Red Shoes deals with the dangerous, magical process by which art is distilled from preparation and effort.

A Powell and Pressburger classic, The Red Shoes is considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made. Vicky Page, a young ballerina, becomes torn between her love for composer, Julian Craster, and an artistic devotion to her profession, which is dominated by impresario Lermontov. Winner of two Academy Awards, the film is visually one of the most innovative and beautiful works of cinema. "A profile of The Red Shoes" is a documentary which contains interviews with Jack Cardiff (Director of Photography), Christopher Challis (Camera Operator), Christian Routh (Film Maker and grandson of Hein Heckroth, Production Designer) and ballerina Darcey Bussell.