Sent by the State Department on an unnamed economic mission to France, Fred Astaire’s millionaire bachelor Jervis Pendleton III falls for Julie, a young woman in a French orphanage played by Leslie Caron, and decides to anonymously sponsor her education at an elite New England college. Written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, the film is a whimsical but pointed allegory of post-WWII foreign relations. In musical daydream sequences, Jarvis and Julie perform a delicate dance of cultural diplomacy. In one of Julie’s daydreams, Jarvis, alone in an opera box and looking through binoculars, watches her dance through the history of French art. She morphs from Degas schoolgirl to Toulouse Lautrec femme fatale to blue-period Picasso, revealing her confusion, and thus France’s confusion, about who and what she is meant to be in the postwar world. She is alienated from her own cultural tradition, which he will rescue and help to preserve. The history of French art becomes the postwar American world of the “performing arts.” All the musical numbers are similarly heady and voyeuristic. In the final scene, in a revisionist spin on beauty (French civilization) and the beast (American power), he proposes marriage as they waltz among the paintings and sculptures in his Manhattan mansion-museum. These characters are so filled with ecstasy by their own good fortune that they continually and spontaneously break into song and dance. “The Sluefoot,” Astaire and Caron’s big band pas de deux, will leave you giddy for days.