The Red Shoes

1948, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, UK

Content Note: Suicide theme

“The Red Shoes plays in my heart” – so says legendary director and cinephile Martin Scorsese, who personally assisted and championed the 4k restoration of the 1948 Powell and Pressburger epic which concludes our theme “Dancing on the edge” and closes out our 2025 programme. 

Real life ballerina Moira Shearer stars as Vicky Page, a ballerina who rises to stardom under the watchful eye of svengali Boris Lermatov. Vicky is cast in Lermatov’s new production, “The Ballet of the Red Shoes”, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of the same name. In the prevailing gender norms of the 1940s, Vicky must choose between her career and her marriage – but will the mysterious power of the red shoes mean they have the final say?

The Red Shoes revels in its glorious Technicolor aesthetic, and for Scorsese offers the perfect synthesis between colour, sound, editing and cinematography. Nowhere in the film is this more evident than in the legendary 17-minute ballet sequence, which uses all aspects of filmcraft to weave between the action and Vicky’s psychological state. The influence of this sequence is clear in films like Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

There is something wonderfully lush, pulpy and tactile about The Red Shoes – it’s a tantalising jewel of cinema that seems good enough to eat. As Roger Ebert notes in his review, “The film is voluptuous in its beauty and passionate in its storytelling. You don’t watch it, you bathe in it.” For Scorsese, The Red Shoes is the greatest of the Powell and Pressburger partnership because “This is the one that seems to cast a spell on many people, because it weaves a mystery of creativity and obsession.”