USA,
1957, 117 min
Shown in 2004
CREDITS
- dir
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Rouben Mamoulian
- prod
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Arthur Freed
- scr
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Abe Burrows, Leonard Gershe, George S. Kaufman
- cam
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Robert Bronner
- editor
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Harold F. Kress
- mus
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Cole Porter
- cast
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Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Janis Paige, Peter Lorre, Jules Munshin
- source
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Warner Bros, 4000 Warner Blvd., Bldg. 158, Room 112, Burbank, CA 91522-6114. FAX: 818-977-4162.
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COMMENTS
Onstage interview with Cyd Charisse by Jan Wahl, followed by screening.
OTHER
A warm wind blew through the Cold War in 1957 when Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse reunited for the first time since 1953’s The Band Wagon to dance their way through this satirical musical valentine. “There should be legislation requiring that Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse appear together in a musical picture at least once every two years,” wrote New York Times critic Bosley Crowther in his review of the picture. Alas, it was not to be. Silk Stockings was the last musical either Astaire or Charisse would do at MGM and one of the last of the studio’s great classic musicals. Ah, but what a swan song. A loose remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, the film casts Charisse as a Soviet commissar sent to Paris to collect a renegade composer working for movie producer Astaire. But the debonair producer and the City of Lights work their magic on the rigid bureaucrat and she quickly realizes that love trumps politics. When Ninotchka’s heart melts, she expresses her joy in dance, whether floating in midair with her lover in their “All of You” duet or twirling about her hotel suite as she purrs over lingerie in her “Silk Stockings” solo. With sublime choreography by Hermes Pan and Eugene Loring and a Cole Porter score satirizing everything from CinemaScope (“Stereophonic Sound”) to that new-fangled rock ’n’ roll (“The Ritz Roll and Rock”) to the fate likely to befall a rebellious commissar (“Siberia”), Silk Stockings embodied the grace, elegance and ebullience that defined the MGM musical.
—Pam Grady
FACTOID #202
At the 1978 SFIFF, Paul Mazursky received a tribute at the Palace of Fine Arts. Apparently, the facility’s janitorial staff had not been notified, and the padlocked doors of the Palace had to be cut so the filmmaker and his audience could be let in.
