Still considered by many to be the best ballet film ever made, The Red Shoes won Oscars for art direction, set decoration and musical score. Moira Shearer stars as a famous ballerina who falls in love and has to choose between her art and her private life. Featured is “The Red Shoes” Ballet, based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale about a little girl whose shoes cannot stop dancing.
“The Red Shoes is... an explosion of color - garish, undried, and vibrant with the feeling that is bitten back in the story and the playing.... (It) was the demonstration of Powell's craze for total cinema - color, story, design, music, dance.... If anyone ever bought dancing shoes because of the film, that's fine. It seems to me more impressive for... its cinematic equivalent of the Andersen fairy tale and its rapture with Art. (It) captivates young people because its zeal is so close to nightmare: the ballerina cannot stop dancing.... The Red Shoes is theatrical and fanciful, but Anton Walbrook's rendering of the Diaghilev figure reflects Powell's conception of the artist as outcast/scold/prophet to an indolent world.”