With the usual lightning editing, scenes clearly written by Pressburger, melancholy Cardiff photography and standout performances: it's utterly brilliant. Note interesting credits / opening also. Some of the editing is almost in the league of Resnais (by Reginald Mills - who like Challis gets a highlighted credit - with Noreen Ackland (Peeping Tom) and someone called Anne Coates) . (Did the French notice P&P at all? As a quick check, there's nothing in Truffaut's The Films in my Life nor in Jim Hillier's collection of 1950s Cahiers du Cinéma articles.)
Marius Goring, Moira Shearer, Léonide Massine, Anton Walbrook, Esmond Knight, Albert Bassermann (his last film), Robert Helpmann.
Lermentov is Powell.
Brian Easdale's music won the Oscar. Score desperately needs rerecording and reissuing on CD. He didn't compose for many films, though a few P&Ps. Love the scene where Goring gives them the new score. Also Walbrook announcing the death.
20 May 2012:
The ballet itself is so extraordinary you can't take your eyes off it; almost surrealist.
Also, an interesting film about the creative process itself, with roles corresponding to Shearer (of course), Powell, Junge, Easdale (mirroring initial composer Alan Gray being replaced), but not Cardiff!
2 January 2010:
That edit where the shoes spring onto the feet is amazing.
Massine brilliant, Shearer's Coppelia also fantastic.
30 June 2008:
After reading Magic Hour I felt I just had to revisit this strange and fantastic classic. Cardiff's colours particularly impressed me - that he was not allowed to be Oscar nominated was criminal:
"I had a phone call from Lee Garmes who sold me a sorry, and rather shocking, story. There had been a meeting of the American Society of Cameramen. It was agreed that The Red Shoes was a certainty for the award. But, as I, an alien, had won the Oscar the previous year, it posed a problem. If a foreign cameraman won the Oscar two years running it would put American cameramen in an inferior light. Bad for American prestige, they said. So the only way to prevent me from getting the award was not to nominate me."Even the ballet-dancing itself impressed me, Leonide Massine's bizarre Toymaker steps apparently emanating more from Powell than him.
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