There’s something innately intangible about the work of Ernst Lubitsch, that most winsome of classical Hollywood comedy directors. There’s an oddball interiority to his work, an almost Henry James-like pervasive presence of the inexpressible or unsaid. The quintessential Lubitsch joke is built not on what we see or hear, but on everything we don’t. As audience members, we’re typically put into a unique position of maximum sophistication and knowingness, as if we, like the characters, were inherently smarter and more clever than the world of surfaces we see onscreen. It’s a world where the hands of the clock, a chessboard placed upon a bed, or Hamlet’s soliloquy can all be turned into the dirtiest jokes in the slightest, most elegant of manners. His typical setting was an old world Europe filled with philandering kings and seductive officers, a world full of costumes and propriety where, as James Harvey put it, one feels that for Lubitsch “all formal manners are a dirty joke.”
He was, of course, largely working before World War II and that’s one of the reasons why his last masterpiece Cluny Brown (1946), which was also the sole film he fully directed after the war, has such a fine tone. The set-up is pure Lubitsch, as ripe for double entendre as any of his other films, but the result is singularly autumnal. Its heroes are Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones), a lower-class girl with a passion for plumbing, and Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer), an exiled, world-weary Czech resistance figure whom Cluny meets as she’s trying to unclog a drain on her day off. Cluny, forced by her uncle to renounce plumbing and “know [her] place” in the world, ends up as a maid on an aristocratic country estate where Belinski is the guest of honor and quickly enamored of her.
What makes Cluny Brown so unique is the feeling that all of the normal dirty jokes one finds in a Lubitsch film have here become tragic and melancholic ones. They remind us less of erotic possibility than of how much is lacking in the world and of how much we lose out on a daily basis because of dumb conformity. The few double entendres present feel as morose as they do sensual. Take Cluny’s fascination with pipes for example. It is equally sexual—“I’ve got that persian cat feeling,” she seductively purrs while writhing around after unclogging her first sink—and allegorical, pointing to a society unattuned to its undergirding issues and messiness. It’s a world resigned to unending dullness, where heroic resistance is a matter of writing a letter to The Times and Belinski’s effort to charm his hosts by quoting Shakespeare is met with such obliviousness that it almost comes across as an insult. The characters are almost fully oblivious to the Nazi threat, more concerned with impressing such dull-sounding society luminaries as “the honorable Betty Cream” (Helen Walker) and upholding the formalities of the serving classes. “If I was a sheep, I’d be proud [to be mutton] to serve the English empire,” a local Chemist trying to seduce Cluny tells her at one moment. It’s not hard to imagine the other characters thinking similarly.
Cluny Brown is a very curious film considering its context. It was made just after the war in 1946 yet set in 1938. Its tendency to openly disparage America’s recent allies, the British, as clueless was met with much offense in the United Kingdom. Yet its comic vantage point is more cosmic than geographically specific, and one never feels that it is directly trying to comment on the specific circumstances that led to war. It is, much more than that, about the problems in the souls of men who have made the world a miserable place and repeatedly brought us to the brink of extinction. It points to what it means to be free, in a spiritual sense, to follow one’s heart and intuitions over what society tells you is your rightful place. Its philosophy is best contained in its most famous speech, which Belinski repeats to Cluny several times across the film: “In Hyde Park some people like to feed nuts to the squirrels. But if it makes you happy to feed squirrels to the nuts, who am I to say nuts to the squirrels?”
Even Belinski, as a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, is so much different than what we might expect in a movie. When we meet him he’s unabashedly trying to mooch off London high society—he just wants 20 pounds to get tea at the Ritz—and in the film his greatest acts of rebellion are annoying the dull chemist wooing Cluny and befuddling all of the small-minded servants around the manor. He’s a far cry, at least, from that other, far more famous Hollywood version of a Czech resistance fighter, Casablanca’s (1941) Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) whose noble self-sacrificing spirit made even love seem less important than moral obligation. For Belinski, love and personal freedom are emphatically the most important matters in life; in all other areas, inaction dominates his character. There’s a sense of resignation to him, as if he already knows the course of the world and has decided the only proper thing for the individual to do in the face of great conflict is to simply live: fully, earnestly, and romantically. Might that not be resistance enough? Might love and pleasure be enough to change the world? The greatness of Cluny Brown, and Lubitsch in general, is how completely and earnestly it believes so.
Cluny Brown screens this evening, June 9, at Film Forum as part of the series “The Lubitsch Touch.”
