Rouben Mamoulian, whose landmark Technicolor film Becky Sharp makes a long-awaited reappearance this month (see January 25), was always an innovator, and Silk Stockings, his last film, although neglected by critics on its release, proves both interesting and delightful in revival. With music and songs by Cole Porter, dancing by Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, and even Peter Lorre, Silk Stockings is a musical version of Ninotchka, the 1939 Lubitsch/Garbo hit about a Russian commissar who is sent on a mission to Paris to discipline three wayward comrades and instead falls in love with a capitalist gay blade. But it is Ninotchka in plot only, for what Lubitsch says in words, Mamoulian says in song and dance. “Silk Stockings contains what many critics consider the best intimate dances ever filmed,” Vincent Canby has recently noted, while Tom Milne writes, “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....” Numbers include “All of You,” “Stereophonic Sound” (a satire on the big screen), “Siberia” (sung and danced by comrades Lorre, Jules Munshin and Joseph Buloff); the sensual “Silk Stockings,” and one of Astaire's greatest top-hat-and-tails affairs, “The Ritz Roll'n'Rock.”