The restoration of The Red Shoes came about when Schoonmaker tried to buy Scorsese a print of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp for his 60th birthday. She was alarmed to discover the printing negative was worn out, and that there wasn’t enough money to restore it. Much of the Powell and Pressburger legacy was, and still is, in a similar condition. So she and Scorsese set about raising the cash to fund the restoration. “It’s been over two years now of checking test prints and determining how the picture should be restored,” says Scorsese. “In restoration circles, very often three-strip Technicolor film can only reach a certain technical level. The colors start to become yellow and you get fringing — where the strips don’t quite line up. But the techniques we used here are top of the line. So it looks better than new. It’s exactly like what the filmmakers wanted at the time, but they couldn’t achieve it back then.”
Other Powell/Pressburger movies are now in line for restoration, but Scorsese and Schoonmaker’s rehabilitation mission does not stop there. For some years, between movie projects (they are currently completing Scorsese’s latest, Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio), they have been working on a documentary about British cinema, in the vein of Scorsese’s 1999 personal appreciation of Italian cinema, My Voyage in Italy. Powell and Pressburger will be in there of course; but also Hitchcock, Korda, Anthony Asquith and possibly others we’ve forgotten about ourselves. British cinema is sorely misunderstood, Scorsese feels, and it needs this documentary even more than Italian cinema did.
Perhaps that’s something for next year’s Cannes? “Well, I’m still working on my speech,” says Scorsese. “I never know what to say. I’m trying to hone it down to my key emotional connection to the film. My favorite scene is the one near the beginning at the cocktail party. Where Lermontov [Anton Walbrook] asks Vicky [Moira Shearer], ‘Why do you want to dance?’ and she replies, ‘Why do you want to live?’ Despite all the other beautiful sequences in the film, that’s the one that stays in my mind.”
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