Critics reviews

The Goethean rupture, Ballet Russe treatment. To rush "into the jaws of Hell," that's the artist's duty, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wouldn't have it any other way... An incomparable hallucination of fatale beauté absorbed by De Palma and Scorsese and Jarman and many others, just the altar for the divine nymph in the aquamarine chiffon gown finally seen with red all over.

These characters have become cinematic tropes partly on account of Moira Shearer's penetratingly realistic performance as Vicky Page and Anton Walbrook's equally authoritative turn as Boris Lermontov. Beyond that, The Red Shoes singularly achieves a primary objective of any moving picture: the integration of physical and emotional expression.

The film's powerful depth of feeling is reflected in some of the most vibrant color cinematography (courtesy of Jack Cardiff) in cinema history, and Powell and Pressburger fashion their own, much bleaker ending.

[Lermontov] is, as far as the love between Julian and Victoria is concerned, the villain. But, if he's villain then he's victim too. For, his great love, mistress and companion, is the ballet. And Victoria and Julian's romance threatens the success of the ballet, or, at least, in Lermontov's besotted mind it does. Their love stands in the way of his love.

To look at The Red Shoes today is to marvel at the full potential of the three-strip Technicolor process... Though their story is a tragedy and far from any conventional conception of escapism, Powell and Pressburger nonetheless succeeded in creating a film with such sensual power, that it should be Exhibit A when trying to define what Susan Sontag meant as the "erotics of art."

Besides appealing to dance aficionados, the film owes its popularity to an inspired 15-minute sequence depicting the titular ballet, a feat of Total Cinema that brings together the movie's themes and draws on all other art forms for its unique spectacle. (This is not hyperbole: Powell recruited painter Heins Heckroth for the art direction, operatic composer Brian Easdale for the score, and professional ballerina Moira Shearer for the lead...)

The ultimate accomplishment of The Red Shoes is the way it combines the dream world of a ballet performance and the spiritual dedication to art, with the actual backbreaking work of the artist and the life sacrifices that ballet demands.

Today, The Red Shoes remains not just a visually stunning and complex film about art, ambition and libidinous desires, it is also intoxicating as a disturbing exploration, from a man's point-of-view, of what it might mean to be a "modern" woman, trapped between a lifetime of individualistic career ambitions and the desire for a contented home-life as a wife and mother.

A look beneath its lushly romantic surface reveals a dark, complex sensibility, and that surface, rendered in the somber tones of British Technicolor, reflects a fantastically rich cinematic inventiveness.