One of the most stimulating and valuable developments in recent film criticism has been the concern with ideology—particularly with the ideological content of Hollywood films, with the notion that the films are "determined" (or, at the very least, affected) at all levels by an ideology (definable roughly as "bourgeois Capitalist," but with specific inflections and emphases peculiar to America) so deeply entrenched as to be largely taken for granted, hence unnoticed and unchallenged, by filmmakers and audiences alike….

Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian's musical version of Ninotchka) offers itself as a convenient example precisely because its ideological project appears so clear, indeed blatant. (p. 28)

I discern in Silk Stockings four main ideological impulses, linked yet partly separable, listed in descending order of explicitness or obviousness:

1. The film's surface project, which could be summed up as "You're better off under Capitalism." The assumption is that all Communists would really...