10 Frames From The Red Shoes

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I learned a couple of things about Michael Powell, the director of The Red Shoes, just now via his Wiki page that seem to be worth mentioning for a fun time and trivia's sake. I knew that his career was wrecked by the drubbing his 1960 film Peeping Tom received from British critics - they found it obscene, basically - which was somewhat ironic since it doesn't really cover any ground that Hitchcock wasn't covering the same year with Psycho and Psycho was a big smash. What I didn't know was that Powell and Hitchcock were lifelong friends and early on in Powell's career he worked on a couple of Hitch's early films and in his biography he claims to have given Hitch the suggestion to film the finale of Blackmail at the British Museum, which was the first time Hitch used a big monument as the location for the finale of one of his films, which would become one of his signatures - think Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much or Mt. Rushmore in North By Northwest or the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur... really the list goes on and on.

And secondly I didn't know that Powell was married to the wonderful Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's much-celebrated longtime editor, from the ripe old age of 79 until he died about six years later. Scorsese himself has claimed Powell as a major influence, as has Francis Ford Coppola.

Anyway, Powell's a filmmaker I really need to dive deeper into, everything of his that I've seen has been a treasure. I haven't seen Black Narcissus since college but there are images from it that still linger in my mind, and Peeping Tom has unsuprisingly long been a favorite. And this past weekend I watched a double-feature - Powell was one of several directors on the marvelous 1940 "Arabian fantasy" The Thief of Bagdad and then there's 1948's The Red Shoes, which... well look at it:


The majority of those shots (#4-8) are from the justly-heralded performance of "The Red Shoes" ballet from which the film takes its name and lands right at the center of the film. It's about twenty minutes long and just a wholly lovely creation. I've watched it three times since this weekend on its own and its a surreal wonder, like a Looney Tunes landscape painted by Salvador Dali. Beautiful.
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