Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2384 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-05-21
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English, French
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Overall, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 tale of the tragic ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) is not in the top drawer of their achievements. The backstage wranglings offer insufficient scope for their usual cinematic vision (though the Monte Carlo scenes are prettily sumptuous). Page's central dilemma, meanwhile, is a bit on the trite side--she must choose between love for a young composer and her career under stern taskmaster Boris Lertomov (Anton Walbrook), the ballet company impresario. The climax is also risibly melodramatic, a rare fumble for Powell and Pressburger. That said, The Red Shoes is worth purchasing alone for its middle sequence, a fantasy cinematic setting of the ballet of The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a girl who dances herself to death. A superb score by Brian Easdale is matched by an impossibly elaborate, shifting backdrop in which all of Powell and Pressburger's sense of drama, colour, invention and the super-real is encapsulated in one small but intensely concentrated dose. While the rest of the film is relatively dispensable, the ballet scene bears up to repeated rewindings.--David Stubbs

Amazon.co.uk Review
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's most celebrated Technicolor fairy-tale, The Red Shoes is both metaphor and melodrama of unparalleled boldness. So extravagantly theatrical a movie was regarded as simply unreleasable by the Rank Organisation back in 1948, but in spite of their attempted suppression it has long since been acknowledged as one of British cinema's landmark achievements. Not only were Powell and Pressburger unorthodox enough to populate the cast with real ballet dancers (including the radiant Moira Shearer in the pivotal role), they built the whole film around an extraordinarily daring 17-minute ballet sequence in which the camera moves from outside the proscenium arch into a subjective whirl of impressionistic images inspired and informed by Brian Easdale's marvellous score. Only after seeing this, so the story goes, was Gene Kelly able to see how he could make An American in Paris.

The melodramatic plot, metaphorically acted out in the "Red Shoes Ballet" then re-enacted for real by the main characters, presents Great Art as something worth dying for, and, in the person of Anton Walbrook's Lermontov, gives us a portrait of the artist as a man for whom anything and everything is worth sacrificing in its pursuit. Loosely based on Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, Walbrook's magnetic central performance is of sufficient stature to conceal the rather trite predicament of his ballerina protégée, and the film's contrived, over-the-top tragic ending.

On the DVD: Sadly for a film in which music is such a central element, the advertised digital remastering doesn't seem to have extended to the mono soundtrack, which shows its age quite badly. The colour print, however, looks very vibrant. This special edition also includes a new 25-minute "making-of" feature with a few comments from crew members (or their relatives) and admirers of the film, including ballerina Darcey Bussell. "The Ballet of the Red Shoes" can be seen on its own in a separate featurette, and there are text biographies and a trailer.--Mark Walker

DVD Description

Bonus features on this special edition The Red Shoes DVD include: the "A Profile of The Red Shoes" documentary (25 mins); "The Ballet of The Red Shoes" featurette; Biographies; a behind the scenes stills gallery; English Hard of Hearing subtitles; and a theatrical trailer.

Customer Reviews

An absolutely magnificent movie
This is a magnificent movie, one of the most voluptuous ever filmed (in Technicolor), one of the most influential, and one of the most satisfyingly melodramatic. Every bit of it works. At the most simplistic, it's a fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes, that takes place in a ballet, which is repeated in real life.

At the heart of the movie is Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), the imperious impresario of The Ballet Lermontov. He can be cold, charming, ruthless. At a party he says, "If some fat harriden is going to sing, I must go. I can't stand amateurs." He's enigmatic except for his dedication to ballet. At that same party he meets Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a young ballet dancer, and is intrigued by her.
"Why do you want to dance?" he asks her.
"Why do you want to live?"
"I don't know exactly why, but I must," he says.
"That's my answer, too."

He brings her into his ballet company and also hires Julian Craster, a young composer. Later, with three weeks to create a ballet, he has Craster compose the music to the story of The Red Shoes. Victoria Page will dance it. It is a triumph, but Page leaves the Ballet Lermontov to marry Craster. Lermontov is outraged and swears he'll never see her again. She needs to dance, though, and Lermontov slowly realizes he wants her back, completely dedicated to dancing, because he can make her a great dancer. He subtly woos her back to dance the ballet again, with tragic results.

The ballet of the red shoes is the story of a young girl, engaged to be married who loves to dance and longs to go the village fair. She spies a pair of red dancing shoes in the window of a shoemaker. Despite the reluctance of her fiance, she dons the shoes and begins to dance. She has a joyous time. As she tires, however, the shoes won't let her stop dancing and she can't take them off. She dances until she dies.

The movie works so well on so many levels. Anton Walbrook is marvelous. He can be cold and demanding and devious as Lermontov, but he conveys exactly Lermontov's utter dedication. At the end of the movie when Lermontov, alone on the stage, announces to the audience Victoria Page's death in a strangled kind of breaking screech...well, you'll sit up straight. Moira Shearer, who was in fact a young ballet dancer at Sadlers' Wells and had to be coaxed to take the role, is a gorgeous creature and a first-rate dancer. She carries off the acting requirements very well. With her flaming red hair, she is just a wonder to look at and appreciate.

And then there is The Red Shoes Ballet itself. This was the first time a movie's story line was interrupted for an extended dance piece. The music by Brian Easdale is so memorable that I doubt anyone who hears it will forget the main theme. Powell directed the ballet as a surreal fantasy. It starts on the stage of the theater, then shifts to a stage that was never built in a real theater, then shifts into pure cinema. After The Red Shoes, other musicals suddenly had to have ballets -- An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain, and on and on -- but none has ever been better than this.

The Red Shoes is a magnificent movie. It deservedly remains one of Powell's and Pressburger's great accomplishments.

At least ten stars!
This extraordinary movie has been watched all over the world throughout the nearly sixty years since it was made. Probably no day passes without it being shown somewhere in the world. I doubt these statements are true of any other movie except, perhaps, 'Casablanca'. Moreover, many of the people that love it don't particularly like ballet. Some actively dislike classical ballet. How can this be?

It is so successful because the director pulls so many of the arts together in one construct, each and all of them to an unsurpassed standard. Dancers, musicians, composers, choreographers, actors, painters, stage designers, cinematographers, lighting designers, studio technicians - even producers! - all gave of their transcendental best to tell a universally well-loved, traditional folk-tale interpreted by one of the greatest storytellers ever, and to tell it as a ten-hankie love story.

Two artists in particular should be noted, as they often get left out, upstaged by the more obvious talents of Walbrook, Shearer and Massine, who each grab your attention whenever they are on screen.

First, and perhaps greatest of the lot, Jack Cardiff for his brilliant, innovative camera-work and Technicolor photography, especially because these were the early days of Technicolor and he, a hitherto unknown Brit cameraman, introduced, for the first time, a painterly eye which amazed the American Technicolor specialists. His extraordinary and innovative camerawork for the ballet within the film has never been equalled.

Second, Brian Easdale's music rarely gets proper credit, probably because the Red Shoes' sprightly theme is lifted directly from Elgar's 1901 'Cockaigne' overture. The music is no worse for that, as Easdale creates his own evocative variations with brilliant development and orchestration, precisely reflecting the style typical of contemporary ballet music in the first half of the 20th century. Exciting, emotional, highly rhythmic, eminently danceable ballet music, perfectly interpreting the subject.

Moira Shearer (a dancer at the peak of her powers on the classical ballet stage at the time) was famed for the unrivalled precision of her dancing. She not only entrances us with her talent and gorgeous combination of red hair and creamy skin, but, at a (much) lower level, reduced males to blubber with the shot of her pert bottom in little dance shorts as she walked towards the exercise barre. Wow!

Ignore the Amazon review - it is disgracefully irrelevant to this iconic movie. This is certainly the best movie about ballet ever made and by any standard one of the best movies of all time. Even if you do not like ballet, you must see it once. If you like ballet, you will see it many times.

I saw Red Shoes when it first came out in 1948, when I was a boy of sixteen and head-over-heels in love with my own real, beautiful ballet dancer!! Which is, of course, why I have seen it several times a year ever since, will continue to watch it until I make my own final exit, stage right, and will never accept any criticism of it whatsoever. Of course this movie is over the top - this is ART, for Heaven's sake! And that driven bastard Lermontov is, unfortunately, only too right. As he says in the movie - "NOTHING..matters..but..the..music." As I was to learn the hard way, human emotions ARE transitory, while art lives for ever. The human drama of how this plays out in the movie is what makes it a great film as well as the best ever film about ballet.

No real art gets made without enormous sacrifice. Ever

The Greatest Film in Brit film history?
A dumb review by the Amazon resident reviewer. A pity when growing numbers now 'get' Powell 'n' Pressburger, to use one who doesn't, the exact same outlook as so many for 30 years after the films were made, ahead of their time. I know there would be people who don't, but critics?!! A wonderful, wonderful film. The ballet centrepiece is a masterpiece but doesn't stand out from the rest of the film as such. The magnetic charismatic characters. How can there be not even one character in this film, who isn't? Standing above all is Anton Walbrook as the driven Lermantov. Forget the Amazon review. The final moments here are the fairy tale made real, chilling and exquisite, the final spoken words, extreme, of course, in these moments from Lermantov. See it, then see A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, all 4 including The Red shoes made within 5 years, by the team Powell and Pressburger and all perhaps the greatest film in British cinema.