The dazzling classic The Red Shoes has several unfashionable lessons for us today

The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 film about a ballet and its company, is 75 this month, and its birthday is being marked with great fanfare. From October to December, the BFI is putting on a major retrospective of the films of Powell and Pressburger, with an accompanying exhibition and nationwide screenings of The Red Shoes itself. A companion book to The Red Shoes by Pamela Hutchinson – stuffed with insight and background – is being published, as well as a lavish volume, The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, complete with pictures and essays (almost love letters) about the late filmmakers from artists such as Tilda Swinton and director Joanna Hogg.

Powell and Pressburger named their production company The Archers. And they hit the bullseye with an extraordinary number of films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). Six of their movies feature in the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, a number matched only by Hitchcock. But where does The Red Shoes sit in the cinematic pantheon? At its first studio screening, executives from Rank were baffled and even appalled, dismissing it as an ‘art movie’ and giving it, initially, a strictly limited release. Kenneth Tynan spoke of its ‘costly and inelegant vulgarity’. Others, like the great film critic Dilys Powell, noted its dazzling experimentalism. For Martin Scorsese it was ‘film as music’, ‘the movie that plays in my heart’. In lists of the most-admired British movies, it nearly always comes in the top ten. Rank and Tynan, you can conclude, perhaps got it wrong.