The Red Shoes

“Truly one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made” (Martin Scorsese). Jack Cardiff’s wonderfully fluid and lustrous photography perfectly captures the fairy-tale origins of Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece of color and motion, which has as its exquisite centerpiece a nearly twenty-minute ballet sequence. The film follows the trajectory of young English ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), whose tremendous talent and ambition find their match in producer Boris Lermontov and composer Julian Craster, with whom she collaborates on a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes. Soon, a blossoming romance threatens the relationship among the three—and tragedy grows inevitable.