Synopsis
Silk Stockings (1957) is a Technicolor MGM musical you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fred Astaire opposite Cyd Charisse.
Hollywood producer Steve Canfield is in Paris to sign a Soviet composer, Boroff, to score his film — and Boroff seems in no hurry to leave. The Kremlin sends three agents to retrieve him. The three agents arrive and promptly start enjoying themselves. So Moscow sends Ninotchka — principled, unsmiling, with no recorded weaknesses. Cyd Charisse plays her as a woman with exemplary ideological posture, and the film's real subject is watching that posture slowly give. Peter Lorre turns up among the wayward agents and makes every scene he's in sharper.
The film adapts the Broadway musical with a Cole Porter score, itself built on Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) with Greta Garbo in the Charisse role. Mamoulian had the full MGM apparatus at his disposal and used it without restraint. As a record of what big-studio musical production looked like before it ceased to exist, it holds its own. Stream Silk Stockings (1957) online on iFILM.
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