Silk Stockings

Ninotchka became a musical first on Broadway in 1955, with songs by Cole Porter, and MGM then brought it to the screen. Fred Astaire plays an American film producer and Cyd Charisse the Soviet envoy sent to bring him back from Paris. Peter Lorre is in the cast. The film is the name of two endings at once. It was Rouben Mamoulian's last work as a director, closing a career of more than forty years. It was also the last film in which Astaire took a musical comedy lead, and the last fifties MGM musical shot entirely at Culver City. Few productions mark the end of an era from three directions simultaneously. It did well commercially too, taking two million eight hundred thousand dollars against a budget of two million six hundred thousand, and becoming the highest-grossing musical Radio City Music Hall had played to that point. Who it is for: viewers who love the classic MGM musical and the partnership of Astaire and Charisse. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the Cold War humour too thoroughly buried in its period.