After he conducted “The Red Shoes Ballet” in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, renowned conductor Sir Thomas Beecham suggested to the two directors that they do an entire filmed opera for their next project. According to Photoplay magazine from March 1951, he told Pressburger, “If you ever thought of putting opera on the screen as you have ballet, you might well consider Tales of Hoffmann … this would be an ideal choice … you could tell the story in music and ballet.”

What resulted from this suggestion was the delirious The Tales of Hoffmann, Powell and Pressburger’s ‘composed film’ based on Jacques Offenbach’s opera of the same name, melding ballet, opera and spectacle shot to Beecham’s prerecorded score. Beecham conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the new English language translation was sung by the Sadlers Wells Chorus. The English libretto was written by Dennis Arundell and the dancing was choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton (who also danced a couple of roles).

Hoffmann is filmed in vivid Technicolor with psychedelic hues, extravagant visual set pieces and glorious music, the entire story told through song and dance without a word of spoken dialog. The principal cast consists of stars from the ballet and opera world. To the two directors, it was the acme of their artistic and creative careers, a film unlike any ever seen before and quite likely never seen again.

Offenbach’s 1881 opera told the story of a young man, Hoffmann, and his three ill-fated loves. Powell and Pressburger’s film use three acts, one for each love affair, preceded by a prologue and ending with an epilogue. The star of The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer, leads the cast with Robert Rounseville of the New York City Opera playing and singing the title role of Hoffmann. Ann Ayars is the other opera star from the same company who sings her own part. All the others, including Shearer, lip-synched the words. Others in the cast include Robert Helpmann, Ludmilla Tchérina and her husband, Edmond Audran, and Leonide Massine, all of whom were also in The Red Shoes.

In the prologue, lovelorn student Hoffmann falls in love with Stella (Shearer), a ballerina who dances the “The Enchanted Dragonfly Ballet.” He makes an assignation to meet her but is foiled by the villain Lindorf (Helpmann). He then proceeds to a tavern to tell the sad tale of his lost loves to his friends. 

In the first tale, he falls in love with the marionette Olympia (Shearer) because he is given a pair of magic spectacles that make him believe she is alive. Olympia is wound up by her puppet maker Spalanzani (Massine) and dances with several other puppets at a make-believe ball. Only when the magic spectacles break and Spalanzani literally rips his creation apart does Hoffmann realize Olympia was only a doll.

In Venice, Hoffmann falls in love with the prostitute Giulietta (Tcherina) who is tempted by the devil Dapertutto (Helpmann) with a gleaming necklace to steal Hoffmann’s reflection, his soul. There is a duel between Hoffmann and Schlemil (Massine) who has already lost his shadow to Giulietta. Stella dies and Hoffmann tries to claim the courtesan, but she disappears with Dapertutto in a gondola.

In act three, Hoffmann falls for a consumptive singer, Antonia (Ayars), who is forbidden to sing, or she will die. The villain, Dr. Miracle (Helpmann again) hypnotizes her into singing and brings about her doom as Hoffmann watches.

In the epilogue, the audience discovers that Olympia, Giulietta and Antonia are all versions of Stella from the prologue and that Hoffmann is only destined to write poems about his loves, never to be with them.

The film is designed by Hein Heckroth who devoted a different color palette to each act. “The Tale of Olympia” is set in Paris and uses various shades of yellows, browns and sheer sheets of cellophane, manifested in the drapes of her circular boudoir and her swinging bed. “The Tale of Giulietta” is set in Venice and uses predominantly shades of red, black and purple symbolizing the hellfires of the devil. “The Tale of Antonia” is set on a Greek island and the predominant colors are blues, greens and greys.

The directors’ artistic vision inspired Heckroth’s visual imagination to create various flourishes such as a huge circular staircase painted on the floor and shot from above to trick the mind into giving it volume and shape as the actors dance up and down it.

Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, supervised the restoration and was interviewed by rogerebertcom in 2015. She said of the painted staircase: “They didn’t have money, and they were told it would cost £8,000 to build the stairs, so Michael said, ‘Well, let’s just paint them on the floor, we’ve been painting everything else.’ And of course, the dancers never could have danced down a set of stairs like that, but when they’re painted, they can!”

Heckroth’s singular vision also brought forth the gondola in Venice that carries Giulietta and Dapertutto away from Hoffmann watching them from a bridge, and the painted lily pads on which Shearer dances in the prologue. There is also an enchanting sequence of dolls coming to life and dancing at a ball. Heckroth’s credit on the film says, “Designed by Hein Heckroth,” instead of the usual art direction credit. He was nominated for two Oscars for art direction and costume design for Hoffmann. He had won three years earlier for Best Art Direction for The Red Shoes.

Distorted scale, hyperreal sets, fantasy fabulous costumes, stylized acting reminiscent of Grand Guignol theater, or commedia dell’arte-like fools and cringing servants, all add to the fantastical whole. The whole production was filmed at London’s Shepperton Studios and a two-week rehearsal period was followed by nine weeks of production. The puppets took another two weeks to shoot; they were driven by puppeteer John Wright.

One of the film’s biggest fans was Cecil B. deMille who wrote the directors a fan letter which is reproduced on powell-pressburger.org. It reads in part,

“From my earliest theatre-going days I have been a lover of Grand Opera. The physical drawbacks of the average operatic presentation have often bothered me – in fact, it is hard for me to remember a production which did not make heavy demands on the imagination. The only satisfactory frame of mind to bring to the theatre was to say to oneself, “Well – you can’t have everything.”

Your production of “Tales of Hoffman” (sic) has proven that you can have everything. For the first time in my life, I was treated to Grand Opera where the beauty, power and scope of the music was equally matched by the visual presentation.

I thank you for outstanding courage and artistry in bringing to us Grand Opera as it existed until now, only in the minds of those who created it.”

While Pauline Kael of the New Yorker panned the film in her 1982 book “5001 Nights at the Movies” by writing “the whole thing seems to be the product of an aberrant, second-rate imagination that confuses décor with art,” filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and George Romero have cited it as key in their artistic development. In introducing the 4K restoration, Scorsese said he was ‘obsessed and entranced’ with the film. “The Red Shoes is filled with music and dance. The Tales of Hoffmann is music and dance,” he observed.

Schoonmaker talked about her delight in discovering lost footage and some closing credits that were cut out of the original. “In the third act, there’s an additional 6 minutes, which shows the father getting angry at his daughter because he’s afraid that the influence of her mother is going to make her want to sing again and he knows that if she sings, she’s going to die. That part was removed from the original film, and I think it weakened the third act a lot … [producer Alexander] Korda had made them cut it, and my husband was very angry about it, so we were delighted to put it back.

And then, at the very end, the introduction of the cast members was also restored. I saw it as we were restoring the film. We got to the end and all of a sudden, this little scene came up and I said, “What is that?” And they said, “Oh, this is something we don’t have the sound for, so we’re not going to restore it.” I said, “Oh my gosh, yes, we are, it’s so brilliant!” I created the sound for it with music and applause. No one has ever seen that footage before. It wasn’t even in the initial release.” The footage shows the dancer/actors taking a bow alongside the opera star that sang their roles.

The 2015 4K restoration of the film was funded in part by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in partnership with the Film Foundation, the British Film Institute and StudioCanal. It runs 136 minutes including the missing footage and final credits sequence.