The Red Shoes (1948)

Country: United Kingdom
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Screenwriters: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Keith Winter
Stars: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring

The masterful team of Powell and Pressburger created their grandest works with this film about a ballet, loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen's morality tale about a pair of magic shoes.

The story takes a romantic look at the high price of ambition, the dues paid when one aspires to greatness. The ballet created for the film is one of the most technically marvelous sequences in movies, featuring some truly inspired dancing and camera trickery. The talent of the protagonist is quite literally impossible, making the ending all the more gut wrenching.

But don't just take our word for it. Martin Scorsese considers it and Renoir's The River to be the two most beautiful color films ever made. —GT