ERNST LUBITSCH’s “Cluny Brown” shows the adventures of a girl who forgets her place in a society of people who never forget, and kids English snobbism with comic-strip obviousness. It is one of the most ingratiating films around, is free and easy and good-natured the way most movies should be in summertime. Its humor, though, reflects a new Lubitsch touch—it is broad, predictable, monstrously heavy and reminds you of the kind of touch that designs most bank buildings in this country.
Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is a person-who-doesn’t-sit-around-and-mope, is sociable, eager to help, a hearty plumber’s niece who loves plumbing. She does some of her uncle’s jobs in a lucky, slam-bang style that works on the particular sinks in this movie but casts a terrible light on plumbing as a skill. Cluny makes you suspect she doesn’t know one end of a monkey-wrench from the other and she whams the pipe that’s most accessible to cure any evil from a plugged drain to an Academy Award sink that sounds like a boiler factory having delirium tremens. She not only talks a Hepburn streak but has the rare ability to hold her own on any intellectual level, including communion with dogs. Her troubles come from being so friendly, spontaneous and impulsive in a rigid, custom-bound society. Though her idea of heaven is life with the stuffiest male (Richard Haydn) in the most paralyzed home in that society, she is saved in the last of the ninth, fairy-story fashion, by a not-too-principled Czech liberal named Belinsky (Charles Boyer) who by a series of impossible coincidences is generally within shouting distance of Cluny.
Some things about the movie make it seem as artificial as the orange drinks sold on Broadway, but among its virtues is Jennifer Jones’s performance, which makes Cluny an unusually sparkling person with more liveliness, intensity, girlish enthusiasm and good nature than a half-dozen average movie heroines. As an actress Miss Jones is one of the most affected, gauche players working at the moment, but the exuberance she gives Cluny seems bona-fide and is of an amount that you usually encounter only in the heroines of Russian films.
There is a great deal of pretension in “Cluny Brown” that it is a critique, however entertaining, of various facets of British life, and I do think it is a little less namby-pamby than the usual Hollywood satire. But you aren’t likely to be much affected by the dressing-downs, the puttings in her place and the cruelties that Cluny suffers, nor does the film make you very critical of the silliness and stupidity of the insulated aristocrats she works for. For one thing, the sumptuousness of the production makes everyone’s life, even the druggist’s, seem rather wonderful. Also while it is obvious that the director and writer feel pretty good about everyone, especially Cluny and her Czech savior, there isn’t a non-snob among them. Of all these characters Cluny is the one who luxuriates most contentedly in the various existences she encounters at Friars-Carmel. The director gives her so little the look of a worker when she’s plumbing that you are led to think she is slumming when she works on sinks. The hero, Belinsky, who is considered such a charming philosophic person, is actually an unusually snide customer who treats everyone, including Cluny, as stupid, quaint and funny.
Few films have ever had such a country-club air. Every scene—especially the ones in the countryside near Friars-Carmel, which are as lovely as the landscapes in Venetian paintings—gives the feeling that it is not only taking place in the shade but in shade that is air-conditioned. The druggist’s living room, which is described wonderfully—“It may not be Buckingham Palace, but it’s Wilson’s little castle”—has a restful, cool, retreat quality that will undoubtedly drive some people who live in tenements almost out of their minds. Also the sets have been decorated with bric-a-brac and shadows in a tasteful, luxurious style so that they have the same elegance and charm that Lady Carmel’s dresses have. The costuming, especially the splendid maid’s outfit Cluny wears, would, I think, make the most determined Dead End character yearn for such finery.
July 29, 1946