The Man Who Loved Redheads (1955)

(On Cable TV, June 2020) It’s hard to resist the appeal of a title like The Man Who Loved Redheads (I feel called out), but there is something quite unusual about the film. It’s about one man’s life-long obsession with a specific woman (a redhead, obviously), so much so that, even as a married man, he keeps having affairs with women who remind him of her. Where it gets interesting is that the four women he woos over the film’s decades are all played by Moira Shearer. What’s more, the film has a very present narrator (one who asks questions to passersbys, and who tells us that there’s nothing to know if he doesn’t know) as well as a sense of wry humour that gets pretty funny at times, even despite the film’s frequent slow patches and immoral centre. Amusingly enough, one of the characters played by former ballerina Shearer is… a ballet dancer, which gives director Harold French an opportunity to stage an out-of-place ballet paying homage to her previous role in the classic The Red Shoes. Despite running the risk of turning into a shaggy dog story, The Man Who Loved Redheads’ ending is interesting from a narrative perspective — as a way to exorcise the protagonist’s obsession but also to show how meaningless it was.