The Red Shoes, Restored

01A Miracle of Colour That Still Burns

Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes arrived in 1948 and immediately overturned every assumption about what a British film could feel like. Adapted loosely from Hans Christian Andersen, it tells the story of Vicky Page — a dancer torn between the demands of an obsessive impresario and a young composer who loves her — and it does so with a visual extravagance that still stops the breath. The three-strip Technicolor cinematography, shot by Jack Cardiff, gives reds that bleed off the screen like a wound, and blues so deep they seem to have no bottom.

The centrepiece ballet sequence runs for nearly seventeen minutes and abandons all pretence of theatrical realism: sets dissolve into expressionist dreamscapes, the dance bleeds into metaphor, and Cardiff's camera moves through it all as if itself entranced. Nothing in British studio cinema, before or since, quite matches it.

What a proper restoration recovers — and what viewers who have only encountered faded repertory prints or middling transfers have been missing — is precisely that saturation. Technicolor in its three-strip form was always a dye-transfer process, rich and physical in a way digital colour grading struggles to replicate. A good restoration, working from original nitrate elements, returns the image to something close to its first-release intensity: the burnt orange of stage lighting, the specific crimson of those shoes.

The Red Shoes was not immediately beloved by British critics, who found it overwrought. American audiences disagreed, making it a considerable transatlantic hit and, eventually, one of the most influential films ever made about the cost of art. Martin Scorsese has cited it repeatedly; Francis Ford Coppola has too. Its reputation has never dimmed.

Seek out a restored screening whenever one surfaces. The film was made to be seen large and bright, and anything less is a courtesy it doesn't deserve.