When The Red Shoes was released in 1948, it was the fifth triumph in five years for the director-writer team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The roll began with lyric wartime love stories: the haunting idyll of 1944’s A Canterbury Tale; the windswept romance of 1945’s I Know Where I’m Going; and the romance interruptus of 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death, which takes place on earth and in heaven. Then the focus shifted. Black Narcissus, in 1947, was the eerily eroticized tale of a nuns’ order in the high Himalayas. In 1948, The Red Shoes told the story—gorgeously—of a ballerina’s consuming need to dance. This unexpected, record-breaking sensation brought a new audience to classical ballet and sent generations of little girls to the barre.

Love. God. Art. Powell and Pressburger pursued their theme of passion into stark, steep, and sacrificial places. “A Matter of Life and Death” could work as the title for any of these films—especially the last two, which in ravishing Technicolor move from commitment to compulsion, Black Narcissus drifting, The Red Shoes leaping. As Powell later put it: “We had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy . . . now that the war was over, The Red Shoestold us to go and die for art.” The postwar audience understood this. It was the same principle under which Christian Dior was operating when he brought out his earth-shaking New