The Tales of Hoffmann

“You Will Never See Anything Finer On The Screen!”

Three women haunt a melancholy poet: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer. Hoffmann tells their stories one after another, with Moira Shearer playing Stella and the doll Olympia, and Léonide Massine taking three roles. Powell and Pressburger, adapting Offenbach's opera, stage all of it in Technicolor, so the singing and the dancing arrive in the same saturated frame.