With music and songs by Cole Porter, dancing by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and direction by Rouben Mamoulian, Silk Stockings is “so crammed with delights that it seems incredible that anybody...should have failed to respond” (Tom Milne, “Mamoulian”). Critics did, however, fail Mamoulian on this, his last film - which is based on the Broadway play which in turn is based on Lubitsch's Ninotchka - with a two-fold attack: The first, that Cyd Charisse is not Garbo, is easily dismissed, for Garbo neither sang nor danced, and what Lubitsch told in words, Mamoulian tells in dance. As for the second, Robin Wood points out, “By 1957, irrespective of one's political stance...(Communism) was no longer a subject for flippancy.... Critics were also antagonized, one guesses, because Capitalist ideology is presented so blatantly in Silk Stockings...making manifest what ‘good taste' would conceal” (in “Art and Ideology,” Film Comment).
The story itself follows closely to that of the 1939 film: a Russian commissar is sent on a mission to Paris to discipline three wayward comrades and, while there, falls in love with a Western gay blade. But Silk Stockings is Ninotchka in plot only, and it is pure Mamoulian. “The ease with which (Mamoulian) slips in and out of dialogue sequences and into musical numbers without any perceptible faltering in rhythm is incredible, as is the constant invention he brings to the action.... Quite apart from its use of dance to narrate the progress of the love story, Silk Stockings is so rich in invention that it gives the lie...to the myth of Mamoulian's decline” (Tom Milne).
Numbers include “All of You” and “Paris Loves Lovers”; “Siberia” and “Red Blues” sung (and danced!) by the three comrades, Peter Lorre, Jules Munshin and Joseph Buloff; and one of Astaire's greatest top-hat-and-tails numbers, “The Ritz Roll'n Rock.” (JB)