“Profoundly serious, sublimely innocent, yet deeply and mysteriously erotic.”
Moira Shearer stars as Victoria Page, a young ballerina who is plucked from obscurity to join the world-renowned Ballet Lermontov. But Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) is a monsterous perfectionist, who tests Vicky's dedication to the ballet by making her choose between her career and her romance with promising young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). Powell and Pressburger's ingenious retelling of the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale (in which a young girl, unable to remove the titular red shoes, dances herself to death) is not only the partnership's greatest achievement but also one of the greatest films ever made.