The 1948 movie Martin Scorsese crowned as “the very greatest ever made”
You don’t have to look far to find Martin Scorsese going into complete fanboy mode over Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 drama The Red Shoes.
Whether it’s during interviews or official “Best Of” lists, Scorsese always has time to sing the praises of the British ballet drama. In fact, when Scorsese assembled his most recent top ten for the Criterion Collection in 2014, he acknowledged how often he had name-checked.
“I’ve said and written so much about this picture over the years,” Scorsese said. “For me it’s always been one of the very greatest ever made, and every time I go back to look at it—about once a year—it’s new: it reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper”. Scorsese acknowledged how rare it was to find a film that you could go back to and find something different in time and time again.
“What is it that’s so special about The Red Shoes? Of course, it’s beautiful, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made; it has such an extraordinary sense of magic – look again at the scene where Moira Shearer is walking up the steps to Anton Walbrook’s villa, especially in the new restoration: it seems like she’s floating on currents of sparkling light and air,” Scorsese adds.
“And there’s no other picture that dramatises and visualises the overwhelming obsession of art, the way it can take over your life.”
Martin Scorsese
That theme helps explain why the film continues to resonate far beyond audiences with any particular interest in ballet. At its heart, The Red Shoes is about the sacrifices demanded by artistic ambition and the uneasy balance between creative fulfilment and personal happiness. Those questions remain just as relevant today as they were in post-war Britain. Whether the subject is dance, filmmaking, music or literature, the tension between devotion to one’s craft and the rest of life is something generations of artists have recognised in Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece.
“But on a deeper level, in the movement and energy of the filmmaking itself, is a deep and abiding love of art, a belief in art as a genuinely transcendent state,” Scorsese concludes. His 2014 assessment echoes the same sentiments that Scorsese shared about the film in 2009, while introducing the film during a special screening that unfolded into a lengthy discussion
“This film is music. It’s cinema as music,” Scorsese explained about the film. “I don’t mean a musical — musical is a genre that I love. [But] this is a film that I love. Every aspect of it [the design, the colour], the way the film’s edited, the movement within the frame and the movement of the frame, the dialogue, the milieu.”
“It isn’t as simple as music intercut with images,” Scorsese added. “It has something else that makes it a piece of music, in a way. That you can run the film through your head and through your mind and your soul like music — images come to mind and perceptions of dialogue.”
It’s also possible to trace the film’s fingerprints through Scorsese’s own career. While his stories are often rooted in very different worlds, from New York gangsters to troubled boxers and obsessive dreamers, many of his greatest films share the same fascination with people consumed by a calling they cannot escape.
The restless energy of Raging Bull, the feverish intensity of Taxi Driver and even the ambition driving The Aviator all echo ideas that Powell and Pressburger explored decades earlier. Scorsese may admire The Red Shoes as a film lover, but he also speaks about it like a filmmaker who learned something fundamental from it.
