This film screened 11th & 12th December 2010.

No ballet film before this had been so ambitious either in its casting (headed by A-list dancers in Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine) or in its spectacular staging. The Red Shoes became the team’s biggest international success, and remains one of the most profitable of all British films in the U.S. market; yet the Rank Organisation, who had backed all their films since 1941, had no faith in this one, causing a break that was damaging to both sides. ‘The team’ is the right term for those who made The Red Shoes, a dazzling blend of skills not simply of writing, directing and dance, but of music (Brian Easdale), design (Hein Heckroth), and colour cinematography (Jack Cardiff): the lengthy scene in mid-film where the on-screen company of many talents plan the Red Shoes Ballet acts as a plausible, and surely conscious, image for the behind-the-scenes teamwork that is energising the film itself.