So Far

Every now and then I visit the “The Emeric Pressburger and Michael Pressburger” Facebook Group. The last time I did so, I was dismayed to find this colorized photograph of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell together with the composer Brian Easdale. What particularly bothered me was the grotesque distortion of the colour of The Red Shoes ballet score, because it actually features in an important scene of the film itself – I saw red to see that the title of The Red Shoes was

The first script of the ballet story by G. B. Stern – which Korda had hoped but failed to put into production in 1937 – can be thought of as the “Tamara” version, drawing as it did on the life of the Ballets Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina, who in 1918 married the British diplomat Henry James Bruce. Here is a brief synopsis: A young English girl, Lalage Maitland (although her name would change in later drafts), falls under the spell of her Russian grandmother who was once a

Previously (Step 1 ...) These Three! Merle Oberon’s swift rise to Hollywood stardom began here. Published in the Daily Herald on 25 October 1933, the photograph above was taken the previous night at the premiere of The Private Life of Henry VIII at the Leicester Square Theatre in London. Hailed in its time as the greatest British film ever made, the film turned Korda into the country’s most famous producer, won Charles Laughton an Academy Award, and gave Oberon a brief but

“I would like to see, Mr Craster, what you can do in the way of a little rewriting,” the ballet impresario Boris Lermontov tells the young composer in The Red Shoes. “Oh, you can take your time. There’s no hurry!” Emeric Pressburger, who wrote the screenplay for The Red Shoes, had a theory that scripts have to be left to mature. He believed that if you work an idea too hard, you risk losing creative energy. “But you keep it in a drawer for six months – better a year – and it

It was the oddest thing. I had been invited to contribute to a panel discussion of The Red Shoes at the Central Film School in Clapham. Worried that I might miss the beginning of the movie, which was going to be screened beforehand, I was hurrying along the Merton Road to South Wimbledon tube station, when, miraculously, I came upon the Ballet Boutique. A mother and her daughter (I assume) were coming out of the shop just as I approached it. The daughter gave her mum a hug

About thirty years ago I travelled to Italy to interview an old film-maker who lived in a small village near Pisa. His name was Charles Hassé. He was a director and editor who had worked at the Crown Film Unit and Ealing Studios during the war. Although he had been involved in the making of some films that I am very fond of (Christmas Under Fire, for example, which can be seen on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGK5EsGzKIg), the most striking story he had to tell me