AGAIN 'NINOTCHKA'-AND AGAIN

...She, in turn, tries to propagandize him, with boilerplate pamphlets and a thick pseudo-Borscht of an accent—a contest which is transferred to London, where it becomes involved with his schemes to marry a wealthy British heiress, and the efforts of a squad of Soviet cutthroats out to recapture their errant countrywomen...

...We may infer that every nuance of meaning was scrupulously planned, polished, and re-polished—in effect, that this was considered an appropriate moment to reiterate Ninotchka's fundamentally affectionate sarcasms and romantic ironies...

...The songs by Cole Porter are lively, but only while they are being danced or sung—by Astaire, and Carole Richards, whose voice is skillfully dubbed in for Miss Charisse's, by Janis Paige as an addle-brained Hollywood star, and by the three commissars...

...Something, however, went wildly wrong—with the script and with the direction by Ralph Thomas...

...That "Garbo Laughs...

...More than this, however, The Iron Petticoat is an astonishingly bad movie, exaggerating all the defects of the Ninotchka theme, and adding several which are quite "original" indeed...

...It also seems to have required the services of a thundering herd of writers, among hundreds of others, to ensure the resemblance to the original—or to turn out anything at all...

...The "Ninotchka" this time is a famous female aviator who flies a MIG fighter to an American air base, out of pique at having been denied a deserved promotion, through "archaic anti-female discrimination [that] would not have happened if Stalin were still alive...

...is no longer of such historic significance as the original flackery for the film raucously insisted...

...To tell it again, from the beginning, and in color, with songs and dances and all the elaborate tomfoolery of the modern musical comedy, presumes at least a little more about public receptivity than does the release of the old film, among hundreds of others, on television...

...those featuring Miss Charisse and Astaire suggest that she might have made the best of his partners, had she come along before this, the twilight of his career...

...To see Ninotchka now, in its original form via television or its musical renovation for stage and screen in Silk Stockings—as well as its hardly masked imitation in The Iron Petticoat—is a rehearsal of several nostalgias...

...The matter of timing may be the whole meaning of the joke, when humor is a tactic, and comedy a ritual of ideological piety...

...The story similarities and incidental derivations are obvious-—especially with Ninotchka itself now available on television...

...The script is painfully labored in its pursuit of laughter, creating such asininities as the preposterously overcaricatured MVD trial, too self-consciously foolish to be funny, or sad, or frightening—or anything but leadenly foolish...

...It is plain that this is a time for remembering an old joke— even if it may never have been clearly apposite...

...The new version leaves as little sensuality to the imagination as can be managed...

...In fact, it is a mystery why Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which made Ninotchka and Silk Stockings, ever bothered to make or release The Iron Petticoat—unless, as may be possible, the film started out to be something really "based upon an original story" about a Russian pilot who defected to the West, and only took on more and more of the Ninotchka temper and substance as its makers ran out of "original" ideas...

...The story, if it were to be revamped to be merely topical, could, in fact, involve shenanigans at the United Nations, with ample opportunities for the satisfactorily materialistic embarrassment of Soviet Spartanism in the opulent department stores along Fifth Avenue, the luxuriously egalitarian penthouses of Sutton Place, and the ultimately democratic snobbery of sumptuous nightclubs on Manhattan's East Side...

...A printed foreword had to be superimposed, stating that the Paris depicted—the scintillant Queen of cities of the capitalistic world—already was of another, "happier" time...

...By 1939, when Ninotchka first appeared, for example, some of the salt of its satire of Soviet ideas and manners had already been leached out by events...

...The presence of Garbo, and the celebrated directorial "touch" of Ernst Lubitsch, are themselves completely characteristic of the world wherein the joke could be told...

...Of course, Ninotchka's appearance on televison is a matter of entertainment industry logistics to begin with...

...She surrenders when she discovers that her American lover is engaged, and after a summary MVD trial is sent back to Russia to face execution...

...But even now, the appearance of the great lady of the movies' heyday as a stern proletarian is something of a personified pun...

...The latter is putatively "based upon an original story by Harry Saltzman," but is plainly related to Ninotchka—apparently by Ben Hecht, who did the screen play but dropped his name from the credits...

...This story, realistic enough to open "at United States Air Force Headquarters in Germany—once upon a time," is fundamentally farcical— even having several chances for humor less sentimental, and politically telling, than may be found in the other two films...

...As it is, Silk Stockings is still a fable, like Ninotchka, and Paris connotes fabulous sensuality, to undermine the most fabulously ascetic Soviet emissary...

...Again, they are thwarted, and pleasantly corrupted by a glib, charming representative of capitalism, now Fred Astaire—this time not the Parisian consort of Russian emigre nobility, but an American film producer bent on commercializing the composer's collectivist music...

...Silk Stockings may be seen as an attempt to recur to the same mood—as may The Iron Petticoat...

...The very idea that the conflict between the Soviets and the West may be satirized as one of naive, dedicated dogmatism versus worldly, tolerant charm is of a special vintage, to be brought out only on certain occasions of relative festivity—like those holiday moments during any war, when the armed enemies cross each other's lines to trade tobacco, toilet tissue, and other material symbols of mutual humanity...

...The melting of her Arctic austerity in the warmth of Paris, as Melvyn Douglas proves to be "chemically . . . quite sympathetic," has the right quality of a formula turning into a human being...

...And again, a sturdy female commissar of impeccable communism, Garbo deliberately imitated by Cyd Charisse, comes to defeat the luxurious bribery and carnal blandishments of capitalism—only to discover her womanhood in the gauzy voluptuousness of sheer lingerie, and the supra-ideological choreography (by Hermes Pan) of the amorous American...

...In one sense, the film may represent an attempt to reduce the Ninotchka idea to complete absurdity, in which the farce not only swallowed the satire, but itself dissolved into the ridiculous...

...The Iron Petticoat, however, shows how the old, sentimental joke may be turned into a dangerous thing, as freedom from the ponderously political assassination of humor becomes worth fighting for, too...

...Ninotchka's most serious, lasting meaning may have been its revelation of a wistful desire to be on satirical terms with the Soviets...

...The direction, however, must be held to blame for eliciting uniformly unspeakable performances from the entire cast, a consistency hardly accidental when the actors include Katharine Hepburn as the Russian lady air warrior, Bob Hope as the American charmer, James Robertson Justice as the MVD colonel, Robert Helpmann as a hapless Russian agent, and David Kossoff as an MVD official "counsel...

...Even the different technical convention of slower pacing of dialogue and action imparts an old-fashioned, leisured tempo, to make an old joke last a little longer...

...The Americans and Russians surely will never go to war over the yearning for peace—or at least relief from the perpetual cold war clash of deadly serious doctrines and ominously global strategies—implicit in the Ninotchka dream that kisses, champagne, and lacy underwear art the best things to fight with, and the only things worth fighting for...

...Her hero manages to sneak on the plane, however, and when it arrives in Moscow it is to find that "the political climate has changed," and the two are permitted to melt the Iron Curtain and go off together...

...Silk Stockings was made by Rou-ben Mamoulian from a screen play by Leonard Gershe and Leonard Spigelgass, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, after the stage musical version by George S. Kaufman, Leueen McGrath, and Abe Burrows, which had been inspired, at least, by the screen play of Ninotchka by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch—all of which derive "from a story by" Melchior Lengyel...

...Making the romantic capitalist an American—and a Hollywood movie producer, to exaggerate the gigantic —may be a satisfactory modernization of the original...

...This exotic quality of the joke of itself would direct our favor towards the original Ninotchka over its followers, even if there were not certain "classic" attributes to mark it plainly as an authentic original, that is always as fashionable, at least, as its copies...

...At any rate, there can be little mystery about why the film was thrust into somewhat hurried release early this year, and is being hurtled around the circuits at a speed to have it well out of the way by the time Silk Stockings comes around...

...But it is significant that the locale is still Paris— whereas a scrupulous extension of the satirical oppositions to new realities |fcy, 1957 29 would need to place them in the present, undisputed capital of capitalism: New York...

...There are still the three truant commissars, here Jules Munshin, Peter Lorre, and Joseph Buloff—this time not on a mission to sell jewels confiscated in the Revolution, but to induce a touring Russian composer-virtuoso to return to Moscow...

...The dances are pleasant...

...Even a cartoon American Senator—"one of our moie courageous investigators...

...The titular emphasis on lingerie is underscored in several shrewdly propagandists strip-tease routines, worked into the plot or into the dances in a manner to leave no doubt as to the real ideology of the film...

...And, there are the corroborative coincidences that a musical version is essayed, and another movie obviously made after its pattern...

...But we may be sure that such a film would never be shown if the ideological climate were less temperate...

...works without a coonskin cap"—is too realistically boring to be credible as a caricature...

...The fable of the female commissar who eventually is captivated by the romantic love and hedonistic luxury of the decadent West became even more remotely fabulous, as its locale was further removed from the front lines of the war which had just begun...

...At once she becomes a target of psychological warfare, as an officer is assigned to charm her out of her Communist loyalties—with the help of the standard Ninotchka anti-communist armament of frilly underwear, gorgeous evening gowns, and wisecracks about brainwashing...