The ballet sequence is clearly marked as artifice, but as the film ends with its tragic repetition, the frame dissolves to a burned-out candle atop a book marked Hans Christian Andersen, the candle which the observant viewer will have remembered as being the very first frame of the film after the title cards. The entire film has, like the ballet, been a kind of fairytale, typically filled with melodrama, romance, and villainy. Post-war, this kind of filmmaking was unfashionable; realism was king, and the fantastical likes of Jean Cocteau's La belle et la bête (1946) had been criticized for their lack of political commitment. Looking back at it now, The Red Shoes is such an established classic that it is easy to forget what a gamble it was for Powell and Pressburger, and like the great art contained within the film, how ambitious and ambiguous it all is.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - Harley Davidson
This is an utterly fantastic movie. The review doesn't come out and say it. But it never did make any money! And the ballet was awesome. This is dismissed in the review as well. Perhaps the reviewer should dance The Red Shoes, himself. :)