Grade: A+
My favourite comedy, released in 1939, set in 1920s Paris, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Greta Garbo.
It’s champagne comedy. There are no blunt insults like Blackadder telling Baldric he looks like a two-legged badger wrapped in a curtain. The laughs don’t follow slaps and whacks on the cheeks and heads like in a Three Stooges film. Unlike characters in a Monty Python sketch, the characters in Ninotchka are always fully dressed and never speak of tits or dicks. Greta Garbo plays a Soviet agent, Ninotchka, sent to Paris to sell a White Russian’s expropriated jewellery so Comrade Stalin can buy tractors for his people. She arrives in Paris carrying two bags and a severe, joyless face, alights from the train and the porter asks to carry her bags for her. She says: “Why?”
“Why should you carry other people’s bags?” she asks.
“That’s my business Madame.”
“That’s no business. That’s social injustice,” she says.
“That depends on the tip.”
The colloquial ‘tip’ is an unstressed and mono-syllabic lance that bursts the bubble of this Bolshevik lady’s political and intellectual diction that’s groaning miserably under all its stressed syllables. This is not a gag. It’s wit.
Garbo sparkles, first like an iceberg and then like an electric light. She starts the film as cold and monolithic as the visages of Lenin and Stalin that surround her. Her eyebrows and lips return to the exact same position whenever she stops speaking. It’s gloriously intimidating without being robotic. In Paris, she meets a handsome aristocrat named Leon played by Melvyn Douglass who introduces her to the City of Light, champagne and love and her icicle mask cracks and she throws her face open like a flapper let out of a straitjacket. Garbo turns, curls, lifts and drops her eyebrows, lips, eyelashes, eyelids and jaw with a ballerina’s graceful precision. She raises the tip of her eyebrows ever so slightly when her mind’s turning a new corner and when sad she drops her eyelids slowly like the curtain dropped over an empty stage at the end of a play.
She could easily, like the glare from an A-bomb, reduce the rest of the cast to shadows, but she doesn’t. As Leon, Melvyn Douglas is a pirate and a cavalier rolled into one inside a tuxedo. He delivers his dialogue with a swish and a crack and is never lost for words. He and Ninotchka first meet on a street. She asks him where she can find the Eiffel Tower. “Good heavens is that thing lost again,” he says. Ninotchka’s three Bolsheviks colleagues, who like her discover life under capitalism isn’t so bad, are like three grown kids in a city-sized sweet shop. Their eyes grow three sizes when they look at their hotel and they throw their arms out to greet their “Comrade Waiter” who brings them bottle after bottle of champagne. There are no boring characters in this film.
It's a glamorous film where each piece sparkles like the lights of Paris Ninotchka and Leon admire from atop the Eiffel Tower on their first date.