Upon seeing Powell and Pressburger’s lavish adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s opera for the scree, Cecil B De Mille felt compelled to write to the British film-makers: “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.”

The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was similarly impressed by the scale of the production: "Imagine a film in which Miss Shearer and Mile Tcherina are expendable!" he exclaimed, following the American premiere.

Fair enough. The Tales of Hoffman is a wildly imaginative, lavish thing that seems to marry the fantastical tropes of the original opera to shimmering production design. Everything is fabulous, from the Frederick Ashton costumes to Hein Heckroth's set décor to the boom of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra score. The constant movement, the perfect synchronicity between dance and vocal and gossamer curtains, has seldom been equalled in cinema. It feels, as Powell intended, like a perfect intersection between opera and dance and cinema, an alchemy he had already dabbled in for Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, an alchemy he termed "composed film".

This isn’t a film as we know it, it’s what Georges Méliès called cinemagic, a project defined by something otherworldly, something magical.

And yet, Hoffman can't quite match The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp when it plays the 'same crazy love, different manifestations' card. Despite the presence of Shearer, there's nothing like the passionate heartbeat that pounds away through The Red Shoes. And for all the dazzling artifice, the film lacks a moment when, as with A Matter of Life and Death, the visuals simply take your breath away.

Hoffman is lovely to behold, but it's lovely to behold in the way one might regard a Ming vase in a glass case.