chemically sympathetic
by Douglas Messerli
Charles
Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Walter Reisch, screenplay, based on the story by
Milichior Lengyel) Ernst Lubitsch (director) Ninotchka / 1939
Ernst
Lubitsch’s classic comedy Ninotchka,
based on a story by Melichior Lengyel, in some senses is a frothy fantasy based
on cold-war politics. Despite Putin’s despicable behavior in our own times, and
the talk about a reestablishment of just such political boundaries, I think it
would be almost impossible to remake this film with the open satiric barbs about
the Soviet system Lubitsch’s work tosses. The very fact that some of these work
as witty humor, only makes us realize just how different the pre-World War II
politics (and even the post war attitudes toward the Soviet Union) are from our
more corrective evaluations of today. Pondering Stalin’s purging of Soviet
citizens, special envoy Ninotchka (Greta Garbo)—sent by the Soviet government
to Paris to reign in the spending activities and failures of Buljanoff (Felix
Bressart), Kopalski (Alexander Granach), and Iranoff (Sig Ruman)—observes: “The
last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better
Russians.”
A short while before the comic trio have told French authorities that the jewels (of the Grand Duchess Swana [Ina Claire]} have been “confiscated legally.” In ponderous judgment, Ninotchka describes the handsome Leon (the enduring Melvyn Douglas), with whom she will soon fall in love, as “the unfortunate product of a doomed culture.” In Charles Brackett’s, Billy Wilder’s and Walter Reisch’s always energetic script, the Russians identify any feelings of happiness as something needed to be punished.
On
the other hand, the film often twists these same stereotypes into similarly
comic put-downs of Western culture. As Bulijanoff, Kopalski and Ironoff
satirically point out early on when the jeweler Mercier declares that he will
buy the Soviet jewels, but that it will mean a great loss: “They accumulate
millions by taking loss after loss.” Summing up Leon, Ninotchka observes:
Ninotchka: We don’t
have men like you in my country.
Leon: Thank you.
Ninotchka: That is
why I believe in the future of my country.
And Leon, Himself, dishes western values in his radio comment: "A radio's a little box that you buy on the installment plan, and before you tune it in, they tell you there's a new model out." No matter how hard we might try to admire the little Parisian hat that catches Ninotchka's eyes, it is a "silly" object akin almost to the gunny sack dresses that Ricky and Fred have shipped up by designers for their wives in an I Love Lucy episode to prove the nonsense of Paris fashion.
Watching Ninotchka
again, years after my last viewing, I realized just how dependent Lubitsch’s
work is on these series of witty observations for the film's “charm.” But
equally, important, it seems to me, is the way Ninotchka is portrayed. She may,
at first, appear to be simply a gloomy ghoul, determined to visit the light and
power company, the sewers of Paris, and even the Eiffel tower simply to glean technical
information; but she is also almost pathologically honest, which makes her
different from nearly any other woman Leon has encountered. If Swana is the
typical woman of Leon’s past, he can perceive them merely as slightly daffy manipulators,
babbling out through self-centered monologues information that demands response
rather than comprehension. When she attempts to demean Ninotchka at a nightclub
by nonsensically muttering about a dog given to her by Leon, ending with her
exclusion of the Russian envoy, “Oh here I am muttering about something which I’m
sure makes no sense,” Ninotchka’s clear-perceived summary of the situation
takes even Swana aback as she declaims that now everyone will understand her!
Ninotchka, on the other hand, attracts
Leon precisely because she means what she says. When he attempts to trick her
into viewing his own home from the Eiffel Tower, with the hope of one day drawing
her there, she asks straightout, do you want to take me there? And soon after
they are in his house, listening to the radio and beginning to speak
romantically. Time and again, throughout this film, Ninotchka is made appealing
by being like no other, represented as a true idealist who speaks the truth;
and it is that straight-forward almost clumsy approach to life that makes her,
as a character, so endearing.
The
worst scene of this movie was also the most hyped, the “famous” scene in which
the legendarily serious Garbo supposedly first laughed (although she had done
so in other films as well). In the small workman’s bistro into which Leon
follows her, the great Lubitsch, pulling out all the stops, seems to be rechanneling
the directorial idiocies of Frank Capra through Leon’s corny common man greeting
of the Parisian worker’s: “Hi ya!” followed by his attempts to tell jokes which
result in a far more burlesque-like collapse of chair and table. The bellows of
unconvincing laughter this occasions is almost unbearable in its he-hawing
gestures. Lubistch’s famed “comic touch” emanates from subtlety, witty language,
a sudden twist of the plot, social and political blockades to love brushed
gracefully aside. It seems almost as if the studio has written and shot this
scene. Instead of the “the Lubitsch touch,” one might describe this scene as
having been stomped on by MGM hacks.
Fortunately, Leon’s and Ninotchka’s love is
not based on this particular encounter—or any others for that matter. Refusing
the romantic notions of love, Ninotchka comprehends love in very scientific
terms. Leon’s general appearance, as she puts it, is “not distasteful.” “Chemically
we’re already quite sympathyetic.” When he asks what he might do to further
this sympathy, Ninotchka expresses it as honestly as anyone might: “You don’t
need to do anything,” she replies, kissing him. Without all the claptrap of the
boulevard, love is as simply represented as two sets of lips meeting one
another, and by the time Ninotchka is forced to return to the Soviet Union, she
and Leon have clearly already “had Paris,” in the sense that Rick and Elsa had “had
Paris” in Curtiz’s Casablanca. The
later couple’s meeting again in Casablanca, if rekindling their romance, is
basically a tragic one, while Ninotchka’s and Leon’s reencounter in Turkey is
nearly all comic, with only the break up
of Buljanoff, Kopalski, and Iranoff, through their positions in the marketplace,
casting any shadow over what will surely be their return to sunny Paris.
Los
Angeles, May 13, 2014
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2014).
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