The Red Shoes

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes won two Academy Awards at the 21st ceremony in March 1949 — Best Original Score for Brian Easdale and Best Art Direction for Hein Heckroth and Arthur Lawson — and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Original Story and Best Film Editing. It is one of the most decorated British productions of the 1940s and was the highest-grossing British film of 1948–1949 in the United States.

The film is loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's 1845 fairy tale The Red Shoes, with Pressburger's screenplay adding the framing story of a contemporary ballet company. The central seventeen-minute ballet sequence — choreographed by Robert Helpmann to Easdale's specially commissioned score — is widely considered one of the greatest sustained dance sequences ever filmed and is taught extensively in choreography programmes worldwide.

The cast pairs Moira Shearer (a real Sadler's Wells principal dancer cast in her first significant screen role) with Anton Walbrook (the Austrian-Jewish actor who had also led The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), Marius Goring, Léonide Massine and the choreographer Robert Helpmann. The cinematography is by Jack Cardiff in three-strip Technicolor. Sight & Sound's 2022 critics' poll placed the film on its Greatest Films of All Time list. The Martin Scorsese-supervised restoration via the Film Foundation premiered at Cannes in 2009 and is now the standard reference version; Scorsese has repeatedly named the film as one of his major formative influences on the dance and music sequences in his own work, particularly New York, New York and Raging Bull.