Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and the UK. Music video Jackson asked Vincent Paterson to conceive a concept for the short film. Paterson listened to the unfinished song and came up with the concept of a 1930s gangster club. Vincent Paterson, who was a lead dancer in the music videos for "Beat It" and "Thriller", co-choreographed the "Smooth Criminal" video with Jackson and Jeffrey Daniel of the soul music group Shalamar. The video and Jackson's white suit and fedora pay tribute to the Fred Astaire musical comedy film The Band Wagon, particularly the "Girl Hunt Ballet" (itself inspired by the novels of Mickey Spillane) scene. The video, directed by Colin Chilvers, was shot between mid-February and April 1987 at Culver City, California, and in the backlot at Universal Studios Hollywood and premiered on MTV on the night of October 13, 1988. In the video, Jackson and the other dancers perform a lean that appears physically impossible. The dancers lean forward 45 degrees with their backs straight and feet flat on the floor, and hold the pose before returning upright. The lean moves the body's center of mass further than it can support. The illusion was achieved using cables and a harness. In October 1993, Jackson's team patented a method of performing the lean in concert using specially designed shoes that hook into pegs that rise from the stage. Even with the shoes, the move requires good athletic core strength. The video won Best Music Video at the 1989 Brit Awards and the Critic's Choice awarded Jackson the "Best Video" award and the People's Choice Awards for "Favorite Music Video" for that same year. In 2019, American television personality Kim Kardashian bought Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" fedora, which still had his makeup on it, for her daughter North West. The style of clothing as well as mannerisms Jackson portrayed were reused in the numerous adaptations of the video game Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. The song serves as the background music for the "Club 30s" stage, the nightclub seen in the music video, that appears in the game. The video is the centerpiece of the 1988 film Moonwalker. Critical reception Jason Elias of AllMusic wrote that "Smooth Criminal" was "a gorgeous and exhilarating record ... [it] presents Michael Jackson at his most captivating and it never fails to impress". Rolling Stone named it the sixth best Jackson song, writing that it was "his