isajademarilyn I am astonished by all the positive reviews. I have watched with delight Fred Astaire's amazing performances over the years and was thrilled to discover one I haven't seen yet. Cyd Charisse was the ice on the cake. What a huge letdown! Large empty sets, that you hope will be filled with beautiful dancing numbers. Sadly no. Everything is dull from start to finish. Story, acting, all those empty sets shot with static cameras...When a very few good moves comes towards the end, you're already bored to death and only wish to end this fiasco fast.By far the worst I've seen with Fred Astaire, up there in the hall of shame of the musicals.

mark.waltz The 1955 Broadway musical "Silk Stockings" is one of the few hit stage shows that has not (as of yet) had a major New York revival, even at the City Center Encores. One of the reasons is probably its dated communist propaganda spoofing, something as gone with the wind as the south of Tara and Rhett and Scarlett. But we have this movie version of the musical, and if we don't get the original cast (Don Ameche, Hildegard Kneff and Gretchen Wyler) we do get more than acceptable substitutes (Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and Janis Paige) instead. After their pairing in "The Band Wagon" in 1953, it seems inevitable that the team of Astaire and Charisse would be re-teamed, something that other than Fred & Ginger for 10 films had happened with Rita Hayworth for 2 films. When "Silk Stockings" was adapted for the screen, only Cyd Charisse of MGM's musical stars seemed capable of playing that part, even if her acting was nowhere near the quality of Garbo's."Silk Stockings" is of course a musical version of the 1939 romantic comedy "Ninotchka", and was the final Broadway musical of Cole Porter, the genius behind "Anything Goes", "Kiss Me Kate" and "Can-Can". An original Broadway cast album reveals a charming, if not remarkably sung musical score, with pleasant romantic tunes such as "All of You" and "Paris Loves Lovers" added to the snappy comic songs "Stereophonic Sound", "Too Bad" and the show-stopping "Siberia", which is up there with "Kiss Me Kate's" "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" as a classic song for the comic supporting players. Then, there's the big dance number, "Red Blues", which in itself isn't anything outstanding, but an excuse for the chorus to get out there and do all sorts of high kicks and traditional Russian dance moves. (The lyrics basically continue to repeat themselves over and over, as if a skipping record, but getting wilder and wilder. With Cyd Charisse dancing, it ends up the hot spot of the film.) The story of American film director Steve Canfield in Paris to film his latest epic has a Russian composer defecting, sending in Russian agent Ninotchka to bring him home. She finds she loves the capitalistic society and the lights of Paris, and even more so, the charming American man who tells her that they were fated to be mated. But her duty calls her back, and the lovers part so Canfield utilizes the Russian defectors sent prior to Ninotchka to bring her back for the final fade out. Among those men is a comical Peter Lorre who sings and dances for the first and only time, or as some may say, screeches and shakes a leg. Sultry Janis Paige takes on an Ann Miller type role as the American movie star Peggy Dayton and steals every scene she is in. Paige ironically didn't get to repeat her Broadway role in "The Pajama Game" the same year, but when you're dancing with Fred Astaire, why quibble? (Ironically, she would co-star with her replacement, Doris Day, in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies", whom she had ironically appeared with in Day's first film, "Romance on the High Seas").Porter wrote a new song for the movie, "The Ritz Roll and Rock", a spoof of the rock music of the time, combining it with Astaire's traditional white tie and tails. The song is not a classic, but with Astaire's charm and the MGM glamor treatment, it ends up a lot of fun. When Paige and Astaire get together to honor the new trend of glorious Technicolor, breathtaking cinemascope and stereophonic sound, you will grin from ear to ear with the cleverness of the parody of advances in Hollywood movie making. This will never beat the charm of the original movie, but there is a lot of fun to be had in it, and Astaire and Charisse have more chemistry than some of the much younger women he had been co-starring with in some previous recent movies.

friends-496-87689 There is a good reason so to why this is still well-remembered. I love this movie because Julie Newmar is in it. Isn't she beautiful? Classy, elegant, and smart!Actress Julie Newmar wasn't just a pretty face, she holds some patents for shaping pantyhose! This movie launched her career. What a success! It makes me nostalgic to watch this in a way because those women look so real. They don't pretend and they are not stick thin like these days. Their smiles are real.Jessica (blogger)Fantasy Stockings Blog www.fantasystockings.com

Steffi_P Very few of the classic 1950s musicals were original stories. Most of them were musical adaptations of novels, stage plays or, increasingly, the previous generations' non-musical pictures. The quality of these often had little bearing on that of the original. The musical A Star is Born is for example considerably better than the original. But they could also be vastly worse than their predecessors after the rigours of plot rehash, singer-dancer casting and the conventions of a new era.The 1939 movie Ninotchka could only really have worked with Greta Garbo – it was built around her persona. Silk Stockings does not – and could not – have Garbo. Cyd Charisse is not a terrible actress, and even does a decent caricature of a steely soviet officer, speaking without moving a single other muscle in her face. Garbo on the other hand managed to get across the same idea without even such a trick as freezing up her face. She had something likable and beguiling about her even before her grim exterior was broken down. Charisse on the other hand succeeds only in presenting Ninotchka as totally robotic. That may be to her credit but it does not benefit the movie. Her transformation does not seem as plausible as Garbo's, and she is not especially human even after it.And this really seems to feed into all the other problems with Silk Stockings. With the Cold War and the McCarthy scare as a backdrop, there was no way the movie could be remotely equivocal about communism. As such the original story has lost a lot of its complexity, and a tone that was once playful now seems belligerent. Many of the lines seem unnecessarily dumbed-down (compare for example the language used by Garbo commenting on a fancy hat to the equivalent of Charisse and the stockings). There is a new subplot about a Russian composer having his music distorted for a screen musical, and there are a lot of attacks on ostentatious movie-making. But this is as simplistic as the politics, never going further than disdainfully listing the ills of modern Hollywood, as in the song "Stereophonic Sound".Presumably the studio didn't grasp the irony of these sentiments in a picture that was itself shot in Technicolor and cinemascope. Director Rouben Mamoulian probably did, apparently describing the new aspect ratio as "the stupidest shape I've ever seen". For a director usually at his most brilliant and inventive in the musical genre, his work is decidedly lacklustre here. The irony cannot have been lost on poor old Fred Astaire either, who is not at all well-served by 'scope. Either his feet are cut off at the bottom of the frame, or he seems lost amid all the other business on screen. It's a shame this was to be his last top-hat-and-tails performance. It's not exactly a noble send-off.There is one nice feature of Silk Stockings, and that is a sweet little performance by Peter Lorre. He's at his best here, all pent-up as if on the edge of a maniacal outburst. But the fact that this is the only laudable thing to say about the picture shows how generally dire the rest of it is. The Cole Porter songs are far from his best; weak rehashes of material from his earlier musicals. The second great irony about Silk Stockings is that, despite its waxing lyrical about the magic of true romance as opposed to bland analysis, the romance in the picture feels completely flat. It lacks all of the original movie's warmth and passion, not just in the love story but also in, say, the friendship between Ninotchka and the trio of Russian comrades. All in all, this is an atrocious movie.