Silk Stockings (Arthur Freed Productions, MGM, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I took a break from TCM during the next Astaire movie they showed, Royal Wedding, since I had a fairly recent moviemagg blog post on it already (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/03/royal-wedding-mgm-1951.html), and turned it back on for the 1957 film Silk Stockings. This one also had a complex gestation: it began life as a story by Melchior Lengyel called Ninotchka that became a brilliant 1939 film directed by Ernst Lubitsch, written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and starring Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas and Ina Claire. The story is about three Russian commissars who come to Paris to sell some of the old royal jewels to raise money for the Communist government, only when they get seduced by the bourgeois social decadence of Paris a woman named Nina “Ninotchka” Youshenko (Greta Garbo) is sent there to take over the job. Only Ninotchka attracts the attentions of a young man (Melvyn Douglas) who, it’s hinted, is the kept man of an older woman socialite (Ina Claire), and he sets out to seduce Ninotchka away from her deadly serious Communist mission and into his arms. In 1955 this story was refashioned into a musical play called Silk Stockings by George S. Kaufman, Abe Burrows and Leueen McGrath, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, which starred Don Ameche and Hildegard Knef and was a major hit, running for 478 performances. Since MGM already owned the movie rights to the story, the movie version was made there, with Arthur Freed producing, Rouben Mamoulian directing, Leonard Gershe and Leonard Spiegelgass doing the script (after Freed’s first choice, Harry Kurnitz, had bombed out: Freed had hired him to write the movie in defiance of the Hollywood blacklist, but years of trauma over his unemployabilty had apparently leached all the humor out of him, and maybe it wasn’t that great an idea to give a Leftist writer a story in which capitalism totally and unambiguously triumphs over communism) and Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse as the leads.

Astaire plays Hollywood movie producer Steve Canfield, who has made an offer to Russian composer Piotr Ilytich Boroff (Wim Sonneveld) to write the score for his new film, a heavily altered adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace turned into a musical. The film’s star is Peggy Dayton (Janis Paige), a brassy “dame” type whose character is apparently a parody of Esther Williams, since both she and Canfield announce that this is her first non-swimming role and throughout the movie she makes gestures as if trying to shake the last drops of water from her ears. The three commissars are Brankov (Peter Lorre, who needed a voice double to join the other two in song but is otherwise delightfully droll), Bibinski (Freed Unit stalwart Jules Munshin) and Ivanov (Joseph Buloff), and the arts commissioner who sent the trio to recover Boroff and bring him back to Russia is Vassili Markovich (George Tobias, a decided step down from Bela Lugosi, who played this part in the Garbo Ninotchka and got fourth billing even though he was only on screen for five minutes). Canfield wants permission to rewrite Boroff’s big piece, “Ode to a Tractor,” into a pop song for his movie, so he assigns Peggy Dayton to vamp him while he attempts to seduce Ninotchka out of her humorless devotion to Communist orthodoxy. Cole Porter wrote a great duet for Canfield and Ninotchka called “Paris Loves Lovers,” in which he attempts to explain the romance of the French capital while she regards it as all decadent nonsense that will be swept away in the coming world revolution. The song harks back to Irving Berlin’s “Play That Simple Melody” and George Gershwin’s “Mine” in having two different melodies for the two singers, but it also reveals Porter’s obvious affection for, and influence from, Gilbert and Sullivan. Another ballad Canfield sings to Ninotchka, “All of You,” became a jazz standard courtesy of Miles Davis, who a year after the stage show premiered on Broadway recorded it on his first major-label album, ‘Round About Midnight (Columbia, recorded in 1955 and 1956 but not released until 1957).

Canfield’s seduction of Ninotchka is successful, but there’s a blip in their relationship when she and the three commissars come to the set of Canfield’s movie – and are deeply offended when they hear Janis Paige belt out “Josephine,” the big pop song for the film adapted from “Ode to a Tractor.” Oddly, the best numbers in the movie are the ones with the least relevance to the plot: “Stereophonic Sound,” Porter’s spoof of the movie industry’s obsession with bigness to compete with TV and get people going to theatres again (“It’s gotta have Glorious Technicolor, Breath-Taking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound,” with a heavy echo on the words “stereophonic sound” whenever they appear); “Red Blues” (danced by Cyd Charisse spectacularly in a solo that appears when the principals briefly return to Moscow, a plot point far more powerfully drawn in Ninotchka) and “The Ritz Roll and Rock,” composed by Cole Porter at Astaire’s request for a rock ‘n’ roll number. Supposedly Porter had never tried to write in the rock style before (though in MGM’s High Society, made a year earlier, he’d inserted a rock reference into “Now You Has Jazz,” a duet for Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong that’s the best thing in that otherwise sorry rehash of The Philadelphia Story). He called a friend and asked for some rock records, which he then drew on for a truly great number showcasing Astaire, in his trademark top hat, white tie and tails, break-dancing to a song that manages to sound like big-band pop-rock while keeping the Porter suavity and wit. (In their book on Astaire, Stanley Green and Burt Goldblatt called it “more Ritz than rock.”)

Silk Stockings is a farewell movie in more ways than one; it was Rouben Mamoulian’s last completed film (though he would start two more, Porgy and Bess and the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra, from which he’d be fired) and Astaire’s last full-dress musical until Finian’s Rainbow 11 years later. It completed Astaire’s MGM contract, and from then on he’d play mostly dramatic and “straight” roles, returning to MGM only to shoot a dance duet with Gene Kelly for the 1976 compilation film That’s Entertainment, Part Two. (The song was “A Couple of Song and Dance Men,” originally written by Irving Berlin for Astaire and Bing Crosby in the 1946 film Blue Skies. It was Astaire’s last dance performance on film.) Silk Stockings dates somewhat in its Cold War triumphalism, but it’s nonetheless a good piece of 1950’s-style entertainment, and I was amused to read an anecdote on Astaire’s imdb.com page. It came from Tony Martin, Cyd Charisse’s husband, who said he could tell which one of MGM’s great song-and-dance men his wife had been dancing with all day from the condition of her body when she got home. If she came back full of bruises, she’d been working with Gene Kelly. If she came back pristine, it was with Astaire.