AN AMERICAN (AND SOVIETS) IN PARIS
The musical ‘Silk Stockings’ shows Hollywood working its charms on a Soviet composer, but Moscow tries to change his tune
Adapted from Cole Porter’s Broadway musical of the same name, itself based on Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), Silk Stockings (now on Bluray from Warner Archive) is a contest between rival utopian ideologies — Soviet communism and Hollywood make-believe. “The Iron Curtain dissolved by music,” exults the film’s protagonist, an American movie producer in Paris played by Fred Astaire. “What propaganda!”
This shifty producer has finagled a famous Soviet composer into providing the score for his latest project. Consequently, Soviet authorities assign three commissars to repatriate the composer; when they succumb to the pleasures of Paris and delay their mission, the stern and beautiful Ninotchka (Cyd Charisse) is dispatched to bring them all back — unless, of course, Paris works its magic on her.
Structurally, Silk Stockings is similar to Funny Face, another musical ode to Paris released earlier in 1957, wherein Astaire’s glib fashion photographer successfully wooed Audrey Hepburn’s diffident beatnik. But Silk Stockings is less seamless entertainment, in part because of its ambivalence regarding American show business.
The movie starts with the rousing Too Bad We Can’t Go Back to Moscow, an implicit paean to the melting pot by the three commissars — Joseph Buloff, Jules Munshin and Peter Lorre, each actor channelling a distinct theatrical tradition. (Buloff came out of Yiddish “art” theatre; Munshin was schooled in the Catskills; and Lorre, advertised as making his “first big comedy role”, had achieved some fame acting with Bertolt Brecht in Berlin.) The number turns ecstatic when Astaire, then in his late fifties, joins with his own version of a cha-cha.
Best remembered for his early sound films, including the musicals Applause and Love Me Tonight, director Rouben Mamoulian (18981987) had a notable theatrical career, staging the original Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma! and Carousel, among others. His most canny strategy in directing the movie, which would be his swan song, was to treat Silk Stockings as a dance musical — and dance itself as a form of liberation.
Mamoulian uses the wide screen and a generally static camera to frame Astaire’s agile footwork and Charisse’s majestic leg extensions. He also turns the title song into a wordless dance solo for Charisse in which she touchingly evokes her character’s transformation from humourless ideologue to willing sexual object.
Musically, the movie is front-loaded. Paris Loves Lovers is charming, and Stereophonic Sound, which Astaire performs with Janis Paige, the original lead in the Broadway production of The Pajama Game, is effectively brassy. Once Astaire serenades Charisse with All of You (explaining that his feelings are “not a passing fancy or a fancy pass”), the songs are mediocre at best. Some are terrible, in one case intentionally. The exception is the comic Siberia, sung with a soft-shoe routine by the irrepressible comrades Buloff, Munshin and Lorre.
Silk Stockings has been criticised for its reactionary politics, sexual and otherwise. But if Western consumption triumphs over Soviet ideals, and Ninotchka becomes “a real woman,” capitalist victory is not cost-free. Ninotchka’s personhood is diminished, even as the composer’s work is vulgarised. (Perhaps Astaire’s is as well: His final number, The Ritz Roll and Rock, is a misguided attempt to be “with it”.)
Upbeat as it is, Silk Stockings has an underlying melancholy. The fondness with which it sends up Russian culture is striking, perhaps more today than in 1957.
Thirteen years before Silk Stockings, MGM envisioned another romantic alliance between a debonair American musical artist and a sober, if winsome, Soviet lass: Song of Russia (available on DVD from Warner Archive).
One of a number of movies Hollywood made to celebrate our common struggle in World War II, Song of Russia was well received. Reviewing for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called it “a honey of a topical musical film” that was “sure to have wide appeal”. Less than four years later, Song of Russia would be singled out for particular opprobrium during congressional hearings on suspected communist subversion of the movie industry.
Its star Robert Taylor, who told the House Un-American Activities Committee he’d been coerced by the Office of War Information into making the movie, plays an American conductor. Touring the Soviet Union, he falls for a young music student (Susan Peters) who pounds out a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with as much brio as she drives a kolkhoztractor. Their romance and marriage takes on historical significance once Nazi Germany invades the bride’s native village.
Although drenched in Tchaikovsky, Song of Russia does start with the American national anthem and includes a Russian version of the swing tune The Music Goes Round and Round. It also features the uplifting And Russia Is Her Name, by Jerome Kern and EY Harburg (and far from Cole Porter), along with copious Soviet newsreel footage and a lengthy patriotic broadcast delivered by an actor impersonating Joseph Stalin. (The movie must have been a dream assignment for its two listed screenwriters, Richard Collins and Paul Jarrico, both active members of the Communist Party, if not for the emigre director, Gregory Ratoff.)
Michael Visaroff, a native of Moscow and veteran of 113 Hollywood films, plays Stalin (uncredited). The cast includes a number of other performers born in imperial Russia: Michael Chekhov (renowned teacher of the Stanislavsky method), Leo Bulgakov (director of an American-made Ukrainian-language film) and Yiddish radio star Moishe Oysher, appearing under a pseudonym to sing And Russia Is Her Name. They are Ninotchka’s cousins, if not her brethren.
Upbeat as it is, ‘Silk Stockings’ has an underlying melancholy. The fondness with which it sends up Russian culture is striking, perhaps more today than in 1957