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Note : this review is my
contribution to the blogathon My
Favorite Classic Movie hosted by Rick at Classic
Film & TV Café.
The Red Shoes
(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
A young
ballet dancer is torn between the man she loves and her pursuit to become a
prima ballerina.
As debatable
as this affirmation can be, The Red Shoes
is The Archers’ masterpiece. And I’m
standing firmly on my position about this opinion. Even if they have a bunch of
other outstanding films like Black
Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death,
and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the
great dancing sequences and the superb composition of frames and the tremendous
acting of Moira Shearer and Anton Walbrook, just to name those two,
makes it one of the most re watchable movies of all time.
Previously, I
wrote The Archers which is the name of the company of co-directors Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Together they directed nineteen films and half
of them are considered as classics and five of the whole lot are at some level
masterpieces. We’ll however concentrate our attention on The Red Shoes and its qualities.
With its careful
treatment by the Criterion Collection,
cinephiles of today can watch it in a condition that is as good as at the time
the film was released in 1948. On the question of his favorite film of all time,
famous great director Martin Scorsese has often answered The Red Shoes and places it with Jean Renoir’s The River as the two best Technicolor films of all time. His
admiration of the film is so strong that the sets and his signature in his film
New York, New York are directly
inspired by The Archers’ film.
Talking about
The Red Shoes’ influence, you have
Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria
that borrows the vivid colors and aesthetics of its dancing predecessor.
Argento’s violent film also has a visual beauty in his Hitchcock horror. In the
latest years, the Darren Aronofsky batshit crazy Black Swan film which the story is also about a female ballerina
dancer has obviously been projected the crew to get some of the elements and
feels. Especially the relationship between the dancer and the director is
different but shows how strong this element can be in the life of a ballerina.
It is a
sumptuous film that Powell and Pressburger did in The Red Shoes and the production and the final are proving me right
when I state, once again, that it is their masterpiece. It’s been ten years
since the first time I watched The Red
Shoes and I can vividly recall every scene from this first watch. Since
then, it became a favorite of mine and this is why choose to pick this movie as
my favorite classic film for the first National Classic Movie Day.
