4K UHD Review: Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes on the Criterion Collection

To paraphrase Macbeth, the cinema hath bubbles—works of art that are so rare in their beauty, delicacy, and refinement that you fear they will vanish before your eyes. The Red Shoes is one such film. To look at it today is to marvel at the full potential of the three-strip Technicolor process. In the hands of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and cinematographer Jack Cardiff, this adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story pops with reds, blues, and greens more vivid than life itself. Though their story is a tragedy and far from any conventional conception of escapism, the Archers created a film with such sensual power that it should be Exhibit A when trying to define what Susan Sontag meant as the “erotics of art.”

Of course, Sontag was calling for a new style of rhapsodic criticism, and in its own way, that’s what The Red Shoes provides. A study of what draws inspired youths to the arts (is it just the potential for expression, or is it also the possibility of recognition and adulation?), the 1948 film, not unlike Powell and Pressburger’s earlier A Canterbury Tale, follows a lyrical rather than linear plot structure. The emphasis is quite rightly placed on the development of character, and so we see young Julian Craster (Marius Goring), aspiring composer and a victim of plagiarism at the hands of his beloved professor, get his first break composing for a distinguished ballet company and how he matures, deepens, and develops his art.

Of course, there’s also Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), a society girl at first dismissed by ballet impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) but who shares his passion for art and life. When he asks her why she wants to dance, she replies, “Why do you want to live?” Powell and Pressburger are careful to show us the collaborative nature of ballet—its behind-the-scenes craftspeople, who, though unsung, deserve as much credit as those on the marquee—and it’s not hard to imagine that The Red Shoes is their democratic statement on cinema as well.

The choice between living life and contributing art—more the observation of life—becomes Victoria’s pivotal fault line, as she falls in love with Julian against Lermontov’s wishes. Andersen’s original wisp of a story is a pedagogical warning to children about vanity in its telling of a young woman who skips out of church and forgets to tend to her sickly mother, instead putting on a pair of red shoes to dance at a party. The red shoes, bewitched, have a life of their own and compel her to dance forever without stopping, until she manages to have an executioner chop off her feet. Andersen’s stories mix sexuality and spirituality in a way that can unsettle contemporary audiences, but Powell and Pressburger take away the more gruesome elements of Andersen’s original tale, and as a result The Red Shoes becomes a mise en abyme, with the true drama occurring backstage yet reflecting the themes of the show that Lermontov’s ballet company is mounting (shades of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge).

It’s hard to overstate what a breakthrough the actual “Ballet of the Red Shoes” scene is in this film. After years of musical numbers that consisted of little more than pointing the camera at a dancer in static long shot, and subtly reframing only when necessary, Powell and Pressburger completely subjectivized dance with the titular ballet. It’s in the way they open up the space of the stage, allowing for Shearer to flit and prance her way beyond the parameters of the proscenium, but cut in to close-ups (as of her feet when she first magically jumps into her shoes) and point-of-view shots from Victoria’s perspective. Though Victoria’s real-life struggle between romantic love and artistic expression is more earthbound, it’s no less heartbreaking. A tragedy, not so much of circumstances, but of her own dual nature, Victoria becomes a symbol for so much of modern womanhood, caught as she is between her dreams and passions.

The first time I saw The Red Shoes, I absurdly classified it as one of Powell and Pressburger’s more “conventional” films—for not having the daring episodic structure of A Canterbury Tale, the sexual hysteria of Black Narcissus, the dreamlike ambiguity of A Matter of Life and Death, and the rhapsodic romanticism of I Know Where I’m Going! My initial opinion of this great masterpiece of modern art must surely have been, to quote Sontag again, “the revenge of [my] intellect upon art.” Like John Ford, Walt Disney, and Steven Spielberg, Powell and Pressburger understood that artistry and mainstream popularity need not be mutually exclusive. Rather, within the conventions that I had formerly dismissed, that of the backstage romance, the neophyte composer hoping to “make it,” the rising star torn between conflicting desires, they, like the great classical artists, found their most sublime form of expression.

Image/Sound

The 2009 restoration of the The Red Shoes from the original negative, which was partially funded by the much-derided Hollywood Foreign Press Association, has been a benchmark for how utterly gleaming and vital older movies can look given the time, attention, and (not insignificantly) money necessary to get there. Criterion previously released this restoration on Blu-ray not long after it was completed, and at the time it blew away the distributor’s prior DVD of this most sumptuous of all Technicolor films. With home video parameters finally having caught up to this restoration’s inherent potential, though, the leap is once again night and day. But place extra emphasis on night, since the 4K format’s most palpable improvement is in its capacity to convey the richness to be found in darkness and shadows.

The negative space throughout the film’s series of theater auditoriums is beautifully encroaching, and the emptiness of Lermontov’s proscenium-like apartment (with those floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains) once Victoria unceremoniously chooses love over art is devastating. Of course, the subtler improvements only serve to underline just how tricked-out cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s dizzying flourishes are elsewhere. As presented here, the film’s centerpiece ballet sequence clears every last inch of space around itself as the apotheosis of Technicolor cinema, a confluence of color and light in a perfectly choreographed dance.

The sound is identical to the uncompressed soundtrack from the earlier Blu-ray. But even if there’s nothing new to report on that front, the dialogue is crystal clear, and composer Brian Easdale’s still-underrated score sounds rich and full even in dated monaural form.

Extras

While this release is a do-over when it comes to bonus features, who could complain? The set already represented peak Criterion. Martin Scorsese, Archers obsessive that he is, introduces the film with a summary of the Film Foundation’s restoration project. (We also get a slide show of The Red Shoes memorabilia that he’s collected over the years.) His longtime collaborator and editor Thelma Schoonmaker (the widow of Michael Powell) also contributes an interview about the influence of The Red Shoes on her life and on Scorsese’s. She mentions that Marty paid tribute to the film’s great shot of Moira Shearer’s feet as she runs down a staircase in Shutter Island with a shot of Leonardo DiCaprio’s feet as he runs up a staircase. Scorsese is also on hand for the audio commentary featuring British film historian Ian Christie (author of an essential BFI monograph on Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death) and interviews with Cardiff and actors Marius Goring and Moira Shearer.

Less interesting is “Profile of The Red Shoes,” a very-standard making-of documentary featuring interviews with members of the production team. Best of all is a highly stylized painted storyboard representation of “The Ballet of the Red Shoes” with Jeremy Irons reading Hans Christian Andersen’s original story on the soundtrack. (Irons is also on hand to read excerpts from Powell and Pressburger’s 1978 novelization of the film.) Rounding things out, the included booklet features a perceptive essay from David Ehrenstein, one of the film critic world’s most unapologetic proponents of the life-giving importance of art.

Overall

Criterion’s 4K Citizen Kane was the scene-setting overture for the label’s leap into HDR, and there’s an argument to be made that their upgrade of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s fearless masterpiece The Red Shoes is the showpiece.