The Red Shoes - Criterion Collection | Albert Bassermann, Eric Berry

The Red Shoes - Criterion Collection | Albert Bassermann, Eric Berry | Greatest movie ever!

DVDs:

The Red Shoes - Cr...

	The Red Shoes - Criterion Collection Albert Bassermann, Eric Berry Criterion, 1999 average customer review:based on 67 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Red Shoes

I used to watch this on Public t.v. over and over when I was 13, so now that I have it in my posession I am very happy. It's a beautiful story, full of beautiful music and wonderful dancing. It still takes my breath away.

Greatest movie ever!

Cinematic masterpiece in every facet of the art. Gorgeous sets, costumes, colors, settings. Sensitive characterization of the dance profession, delightful classical ballet scenes, thrilling dance performances. Richly dramatic, enthralling interweaving of artists' lives, characters, motivations, loves, career-love conflicts, all while they compose and present the original music and choreography of a new ballet. The depth and intensity of human feelings on the screen blends with the passionate score to create a rare emotional tone in cinema. Soft challenge: Just try watching the whole film (2+ hours) without crying at the FINI.

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Kiwi's assessment

I have always loved this tale. The ballet is wonderful, and the acting is good, considering the time this film was made. I doubt if it has much appeal to people who don't know dancing or are too young to realize the nature of film content and story telling of this ear. It took me back to the time I first saw this a a child some 50 years ago. It's a collector's item.

Masterpiece

Moira Shearer, who died in 2006, made very few films during her lifetime (she retired from movies around 1960 to dedicate herself to raising her family), but her presence was always wonderful. And never more so than in this masterpiece directed by Michael Powell and Emmeric Pressburger in 1948. I'm not going to add much to what other users have said, except that the romantic triangle between a dancer, an impresario and a pianist really works, and is the heart of the movie. The color photography is wonderful, and allows us to see the world in 1948 as if it were today. Perhaps the scene that stands most of my mind is the first one, with all the young people struggling to enter into the theater. This recalls an era where young people love classical music, and would treat its performers as if they were rock stars. That era would end just a few years later, when rock and roll come to the fore, and the world would never be the same. Whether this change was for the good or for the bad, let others decide. I know this, my late father was a teenager in 1948, and he left a lot of classical recordings of that era that he collected during that time, the same way young people collected rock records decades later.

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"Why do you want to dance?" "Why do you want to live?"

If you can hear this melodramatic dialogue exchange without smirking a tad, then you'll dig the whole movie and find no melodrama in it whatsoever. Even if you find it a tad overwrought, however, you'll encounter lots to enjoy, and you'll find yourself involved in the story of the ballerina torn between a personal life and love, and the demanding dictates of her profession and her boss.

The twenty minute ballet in the middle of the film is very appealing, though it's supposed to be on a stage in front of a live audience and many of the things that take place in it could only happen in film. Still, it's captivating.

The performances are excellent all around and (though R. Baker's rule of thumb that everything is 20% too long applies here) the story keeps your attention most of the time, all the way up to the suspenseful, heart-wrenching--and, to me--unexpected ending.

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