Ninotchka

Ninotchka -- I don’t really have an affection for Ernst Lubitsch’s pictures. I admire them, but the admiration is abstract. Probably, Lubitsch’s effects are too sophisticated for me. His screenplays are so highly civilized that they make their points swiftly and without dramatic emphasis. The director doesn’t pander and doesn’t belabor the obvious. The result is that his films have such a placid, even keel that they are – do I dare say it? -- just a tad bit monotonous. Lubitsch’s interest is in the acting, the situations, and the smooth, uninterrupted narrative – his plots are invariably both completely formulaic and ingenious, as generic, in other words, a detective movie or a horror film: he delivers slight, but cunning, variations on well-anticipated themes. Ninotchka implies a moving claim that love should be more important in the world than politics – but Lubitsch knows that this aspiration is quixotic and scarcely whispers his point. Greta Garbo plays a Soviet commissar dispatched to Paris to investigate an attempt by three buffoonish Bolshevik envoys to sell some crown jewels – the Bolsheviks have been seduced by the grace and amenities of Paris and Garbo is supposed to set them straight. Weirdly enough, Garbo is the weakest link in the picture. As a commissar, she is monotonously dead-pan, using her famous low growl of a voice to utter denunciatory epigrams about capitalism and romantic love. Of course, she falls in love with a suave white Russian count played by Melvin Douglas who looks far too old for the role. Garbo is legitimately committed to the Bolshevik cause, and, in fact, something of a patriot and Lubitsch clearly has some fugitive sympathy for her situation. However, he is unsparing in his depiction of Red Russia as a nightmare of crowded tenements, marching girls, and bodily noises expressed in tight confined quarters where you can almost smell the choking fumes of boiled cabbage and beets. Ninotchka, in love, imagines a utopian world where there will be no fascist arms upraised – “our salute will be a kiss.” For this dream, she is backed against a wall, blindfolded, and, then, when the champagne cork pops, collapses dead on the floor as if shot to death – an audacious and erotic image that summarizes the tone of the film in a single image. Peering at her portrait of Lenin on her nightstand, Ninotchka urges him to smile – and is rewarded by a toothy grin on the face of the picture. In 1941, it’s love against politics – but Lubitsch knows that politics will always prevail.