Mamoulian returned to the screen after a ten-year hiatus for what would be his last film—and Fred Astaire’s last dance movie—with Cole Porter’s musical take on Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka. In the Porter version, a dutiful—and beautiful—Russian commissar comes to Paris on assignment and falls in love with a carefree American film director. Adding two additional, newly written Porter songs, Mamoulian produces an even more colorful and comic send-up of both Communism and Hollywoodism, featuring cartoonish Russian envoys—including a happily debauched Peter Lorre—and Janis Paige’s swimming movie star who is trying to recreate her image in a non-swimming picture, a dumbed-down, Americanized musical of a treasured Russian tale. At the film’s heart are the Astaire and Charisse dances, during which they reveal their emotions most expressively, and the ice queen nimbly dissolves into a romantic in “glorious Technicolor, breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic sound.”