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. Few British productions of the 1940s were as decorated, and in the United States it was the highest-grossing British film of 1948-1949.

Pressburger's screenplay adapts Hans Christian Andersen's 1845 fairy tale The Red Shoes loosely and adds the framing story of a contemporary ballet company. At its centre is a seventeen-minute ballet, choreographed by Robert Helpmann to Easdale's specially commissioned score. It is one of the greatest sustained dance sequences ever put on film, and choreography programmes around the world still teach it.

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