Silk Stockings

Ninotchka (1939) is an Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a stern Communist idealogue who happens to be a woman softening and finding love in Paris; the movie, starring Greta Garbo (with Bela Lugosi as one of the Commissars) was a big hit and re-made 18 years, and one World War, later as a musical Silk Stockings.  The 1957 film was the last picture directed Ruben Mamoulian; Cyd Charisse plays the fierce female apparatchik courted in Fred Astaire.  Peter Lorre is one of the three Russian agents seduced by the City of Lights -- Lorre was old when the movie was made and he can't really dance and, so, he performs in the musical numbers by suspending himself between a chair and table and doggedly kicking at the air -- it's unutterably weird and endearing.  The movie was based on a Broadway revival of the film with songs by Cole Porter that are, more or less, clever, melodic, and forgettable -- the exception is a bizarre rock and roll number that Astaire performs near the end of the movie.  The picture is highly regarded, indeed, said to be one of the great movie musicals, but I wasn't attuned to its wave-length:  the dance numbers are suave but not explosive or particularly kinetic, the music is okay, the acting is excellent but the script is a bit schematic -- the story is simple to the point of being boring:  the stern lady commissar melts in the arms of Fred Astaire, here playing the producer of a movie musical himself, and apparels herself in silk lingerie, sipping champagne with her lover.  She comes to conclude that the beautiful is just as important as the useful -- a revelation that changes her life.  After the lovers are separated, she renounces her love and returns to her ideological purity until the plot contrives a basis for her to return to Paris.  Of course, Astaire is waiting for her debonair as ever, singing and dancing in a night club that Peter Lorre and his comrades have established for Russian emigres.  Love prevails and all ends on a merry note.  The technicolor photography is nondescript and the editing mostly invisible -- the film is sleek, well-appointed and craftsmanlike.  Paradoxically, Cyd Charisse is more sexy and has a greater erotic charge as the relentless Marxist fundamentalist -- a more serious movie would hint at some kind of tragic backstory involving famine and war (and we learn she was the commander of a woman's tank brigade).  Once she dissolves into an ingenue in love, the character is less interesting.  Fred Astaire is palpably too old for the role, something that he admitted himself to Mamoulian when he protested being cast in the picture.  The dance scenes are shot in continuous long takes to preserve the illusion that we are watching a Broadway musical from the other side of the proscenium.  The film's style is classical with very few close-ups.  There is a witty song about the three dwarves (this is the group of Russian agents including Lorre) being sent to Siberia.  When Ninotchka arrives in Paris her first priority is to see the sights -- which for her includes the Sewage Treatment Plant; with Astaire as her guide she visits both cafes and foundries.  Paris is represented by the Arc d' Triumph and a couple of sidewalk cafes; most of the action takes place in lavishly appointed hotel rooms.  A lot of the dialogue is cunning and funny.  The composer whom Ninotchka has been dispatched to retrieve -- he's modeled on Stravinsky it seems -- has written an Ode to a Tractor and, when Fred Astaire tempts him with a big salary to write the score for his movie musical, the man worries about taxes.  "You'll make $50,000," Astaire assures him.  Someone asks:  "What will the taxes be?"  "$50,000," the man says. (I think Mamoulian appears in the film as the director of the movie within the movie.)