Silk Stockings Astaire, Fred performer Loring, Eugene performer Pan, Hermes performer Charisse, Cyd performer Film 1957 MGM Silk Stocking, a hit of the Broadway season of 1955 and translated to film, with music by Cole Porter, paired Astaire with Cyd Charisse, as a Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals who goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris where she meets romance and has an uproarious good time: capitalism is not so bad. Featured Cyd Charisse, in her most challenging acting role of her career; and Astaire, as her paramour. This film uses camera tracking away afterward rather than the more typical cuts between varying full-figure shots. In Silk Stockings, the full-to-medium cut is the standard, not the exception. Filmed in super-wide Cinemascope (which director Reuben Mamoulian called "the worst shape ever invented by the distorted initiative of man") the film uses an unusual amount of cutting in the Astaire dances. "Stereophonic Sound" with Astaire and Janis Paige pointedly satirizes Hollywood's efforts in the 1950s to maintain its audience through such frantically promoted technological gimmicks as wide screens, glaring color, and stereophonic sound. "The Ritz Roll and Rock" number is an excuse for Astaire to perform a solo number, a "twist on the rock and roll craze" that Porter composed. "The very idea of Fred Astaire doing a rock-and-roll number is inherently funny, and Porter lyric takes off from this improbable miscegenation of styles: rock and roll is dead and gone." The music shifts from mock Tchaikovsky to rock and roll, as Astaire launches into a goofy dance in which he saunters with affectation of coolness; the chorus lifts him as they scream and flail and scrabble on the floor, all laid on the music with a complete lack of rhythmic sophistication, presuming a conscious send up of the elementary rhythmic patterns of rock and roll. Performing Arts Encyclopedia http://www.loc.gov/performingarts Billman, Larry: Film Choreographers and Dance Directors: An Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia, 1893-1955. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland (1997). Tap Dance America http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html Hermes Pan (biography) loc.music.tdabio.147 Fred Astaire (biography) loc.music.tdabio.16 tda IHAS 151216 loc.music.tda.297