Cluny Brown (US 1946)
Cluny Brown (US 1946)
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writers: Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt, based on the novel by Margery Sharp
Producer: Ernst Lubitsch
Cinematographer: Joseph LaShelle
Art directors: Lyle Wheeler, J. Russell Spencer
Composer: Cyril J. Mockridge
Cast: Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Reginald Gardiner, Reginald Owen, C. Aubrey Smith, Richard Haydn, Margaret Bannerman, Sara Allgood, Ernest Cossart, Florence Bates, Una O’Connor
Production company: Twentieth Century-Fox
Sound, b/w, 100 min.
English language
Print source: UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles
“I wish I could roll up my sleeves and roll down my stockings and unloosen the joint. Bang, bang, bang!” It’s hard to tell what might have seemed more eccentric to the 1946 audience—the transparent sexual metaphor or that the girl is in fact talking about plumbing.
Cluny Brown turned out to be Ernst Lubitsch’s last completed film. It was received warmly and considered delightful entertainment, yet the critics didn’t exactly know where to place it. The more time passes, the more it is regarded as one of Lubitsch’s most sophisticated works, a social metaphor, perhaps even an autobiographical statement.
Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is herself constantly reminded she is out of place: that a parlor maid does not advise her master which piece of mutton to choose, that one should not be fixing a clogged sink during her engagement dinner, and that plumbing is, anyway, hardly an appropriate hobby for a girl. As for Czech intellectual Adam Belinski, deliciously played by Charles Boyer, he had to flee his native country and does not quite belong in a 1938 British manor whose inhabitants seem to live in an illusion of perfect world harmony. (“Haven’t you heard of the Nazis?” asks the son. “Oh, yes, German chaps. Always wanted to see one,” replies the father.)
But Cluny Brown is not a satire on English society (though the British critics were offended). It is not a satire at all: every single character deserves sympathy one way or another. The overall good-natured tone resembles Lubitsch’s masterpiece The Shop Around the Corner (1940)—with the difference that the latter is rooted in old Europe that is no more, whereas Cluny Brown takes place in a world that has been forever reshaped by the war and the events leading to it. It is a parable about the world’s conventions, where everyone and everything has a niche, and people are essentially incapable of accepting “the other." The moral is as non-didactic as it could be: “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?”
This original release print is in excellent shape despite several frames of stage 1 decomposition. The stock retains strength and flexibility, with a shrinkage range of 0.5–0.75% and only 29 splices. Most remarkable is the condition of perforations: aside from a few repaired edge damages, the perforations are not cracked, stressed, or warped. —Peter Bagrov