The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes (1948) is the British masterwork by directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — watch it online on iFILM. Young ballerina Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) is taken on by the tyrannical impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and handed the lead in a new ballet built around the Hans Christian Andersen story of slippers that never stop dancing. The fairy tale turns out to be less of a metaphor than Victoria expected.

She falls for the composer Julian (Marius Goring), who wrote the ballet's score. Lermontov considers that a betrayal of the art — in his world, a dancer chooses the stage or a life, not both. The confrontation between those two claims on Victoria is what drives the film, and what the iconic fifteen-minute ballet sequence in the middle makes literal: feet that cannot stop moving, music that won't let them.

The film took home two Academy Awards — for original score and art direction — and left a mark on filmmakers that outlasted its era. Scorsese named it among the three films that shaped his idea of what cinema could do; Darren Aronofsky cited it directly for Black Swan. Stream The Red Shoes (1948) online on iFILM.