Ernst Lubitsch (1939)

Ninotchka is uneven and can be uncomfortable, but one terrific part lasts long enough to transcend the film’s defects and banish a viewer’s doubts.  Made just before the start of World War II in Europe, Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedy reached American cinemas a few weeks after war broke out, with a premiere in early October 1939 and general release the following month – hence the hasty addition of roguish explanatory text on screen before the action gets underway:  ‘This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette… and if a Frenchman turned out the light, it was not on account of an air raid!’

Buljanoff (Felix Bressart), Iranoff (Sig Ruman), and Kopalski (Alexander Granach), representatives of the Soviet Board of Trade, arrive in the French capital to sell jewels confiscated from their aristocratic owner by the Bolshevik government, following the 1917 Revolution.  The trio urgently debates the pros and cons of staying in the luxury Hotel Clarence’s ‘royal suite’; winning this fight with political conscience, they settle in there.  Alexis Rakonin (Gregory Gaye), a White Russian with a menial job at the hotel, eavesdrops on the visitors’ conversation about their mission in the city.  Count Rakonin, as he once was, immediately informs a fellow White Russian, the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), that her family jewels have come to Paris.  Swana hasn’t been reduced to working for a living and is keen to maintain her privileged lifestyle.  Her current lover, French aristocrat Count Léon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), comes to the royal suite to inform the Russian envoys and Mercier (Edwin Maxwell), the Parisian jeweller to whom they’re planning to sell, that a petition has been filed to prevent the jewels going anywhere.  The count’s even more effective tactic is to get Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski drunk over a long and lavish lunch; he then sends a telegram on their behalf to Razinin, the envoys’ boss in Moscow, proposing a compromise re the jewels.  In angry response, Razinin dispatches a special envoy to Paris to sort things out – Nina Ivanovna ‘Ninotchka’ Yakushova (Greta Garbo).  Ninotchka is ruthlessly efficient, unyielding and, most conspicuously, unsmiling.  Until she meets Léon d’Algout, and they fall in love.

Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski assume their senior colleague, coming to Paris by train, will be a man.  They’ve no idea what he looks like and buzz around a busy station platform trying to pick him out.  ‘He looks like a comrade!’, decides Buljanoff, until the man in question gives a Nazi salute to the person he’s meeting.  If that provokes a sharp intake of breath – though it’s nothing compared with To Be or Not to Be, which Lubitsch made three years later – Ninotchka‘s comedy treatment of the Soviet system makes for more protracted unease.  It’s one thing doing jokes about five-year plans and dowdy outfits, another getting laughs from the envoys’ fears of exile to Siberia (never mind that happened in Tsarist Russia as well as during the communist era).  You sometimes laugh despite yourself, as when Ninotchka and Léon return to her hotel suite and indulge in a firing squad pantomime.  Both are already intoxicated, champagne virgin Ninotchka especially so; tying a napkin over her face, Léon opens another bottle of champagne, and she slumps to the ground when the cork pops.  The scene is redeemed by a lovely grace note – before he opens the bottle, Léon pauses and briefly lifts Ninotchka’s blindfold to kiss her.

Plenty of contributors, on both sides of the camera, had emigrated from Europe to the US.  Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, who wrote the screenplay with American-born Charles Brackett, were Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany – ditto Felix Bressart and Alexander Granach.  The latter’s escape route was via the Soviet Union; whereas Gregory Gaye really was a White Russian.  Others, like Lubitsch himself and Melchior Lyengel (who receives the story credit), though Jewish, came to Hollywood before the Nazi era, while Bela Lugosi (who eventually appears as Razinin) and Sig Ruman – not to mention Garbo herself – had Christian upbringings in Europe.  Despite this intriguing mix of backgrounds, Ninotchka is smug about the nonsense of communism and the superiority of capitalism.  (It’s striking to reflect that the Great Depression was barely over and that, within a few years, Hollywood would be Red Scare-riven.)  With Léon, Swana and minor French characters played by born-and-bred Americans, there’s also a persistent whiff of Hollywood cultural imperialism in the air.

None of this stops Ninotchka from being enjoyable.  At first, the comedy is more pleasingly accomplished than laugh out loud:  the envoys’ arrival at the swanky hotel; debonair Léon’s opening scene with vain, self-centred Swana; the Russians’ lunch with Léon.  (It takes place behind closed doors; the comings-and-goings of short-skirted waitresses and the sounds of increasing merriment from inside the royal suite signal the fun being had.)  These preparatory scenes last a bit too long and it’s a relief when Ninotchka arrives on the scene.  From the point at which she and Léon first meet on a Paris street – each unaware of who the other is – the film takes off.  Nothing has prepared you for the sheer delight of the first evening that the formidably logical apparatchik and the affably hedonistic aristo spend together, at the Eiffel Tower, then at his apartment.  She relentlessly disparages his moribund culture and takes to pieces silly ideas of romantic love.  A self-described ‘tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution’, Ninotchka succeeds only in enchanting her companion – ‘You’re the most adorable cog I ever saw in my life’.  For her part, though insisting that love is just ‘a biological, or shall we say chemical, process’, she concedes that ‘chemically, we are already quite sympathetic’ and even goes so far as to tell Léon that ‘his general appearance is not distasteful’.  Then, shortly after midnight, he takes a telephone call from Buljanoff.  Léon and Ninotchka realise who they’ve been with for the past few hours.  Despite his protests, she brusquely leaves his apartment, to get back to the job in hand.

Greta Garbo is splendid – really funny – as the poker-faced Ninotchka, and Melvyn Douglas a perfect comic partner.  The impetus is sustained all the way through to lunchtime the next day.  Not to be deterred, Léon follows Comrade Yakushova to a working-men’s bistro, pretending to be a regular there – not that Ninotchka is fooled.  He sits himself down at her table and tries to improve her mood by telling her jokes.  Her face doesn’t crack, even though one of the jokes is pretty good.  A group of men at a neighbouring table laugh loudly at it, but not as loudly as when Léon leans too far back in his chair, and crashes to the floor.  Ninotchka, too, finds this hilarious.  Garbo’s laughter, a legendary screen moment, is pivotal in the pair’s romance.  It’s also a turning point in Ninotchka in perhaps less intended ways.

‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard’ … it maybe follows from that well-known acting maxim that crying is easy, laughing is hard.  The immediate problem when ‘Garbo Laughs!’ is that you don’t believe her.  According to Pauline Kael, there’s ‘a widespread story that when the time came for her laughing scene [Garbo] pantomimed laughter beautifully, but no sound emerged; it was later provided by someone anonymous’.  Whatever the reason, the effect is oddly unnatural.  (Melvyn Douglas’s switch to mirth is, despite Léon’s spectacular loss of dignity, more convincing.  Léon is embarrassed and annoyed by Ninotchka’s reaction, before joining in the laughter with gusto.)  The turning point results in a longer-term problem, too.  When Ninotchka cracks up, Lubitsch clearly means the moment to express the ending of her resistance to Léon.  The trouble is, Greta Garbo is too ready to revert to what she usually did and was celebrated for – too eager to go into woman-in-love self-surrender mode.  On one level, this makes sense because the role here is so much about the star herself.  Ninotchka’s humour bypass corresponds to Garbo’s reputation as an unsurpassed screen tragedienne; there’s more than one reference in the Ninotchka script to wanting to be alone.  On another level, though, the film seems to deflate from this point on – and Garbo’s characterisation is made to seem lacking.

Still, although Ninotchka never quite recovers the momentum of that earlier passage, there are lots of good bits to come, as the heroine thaws and is seduced by French champagne and couture, as well as charmed by Léon.   (Garbo’s wardrobe is, as usual, designed by Adrian.  It includes a memorably ridiculous ‘chic’ hat that Ninotchka first deplores, then sets her heart on and buys.  It’s a blessing when she takes it off.)  There’s a fine caustic exchange between the leading lady and Swana, who proves more anxious to get rid of Ninotchka than to get back her jewels, though she does the latter to achieve the former – and to get Léon back, too.  During the night, Rakonin swipes the jewels from Ninotchka’s hotel room, where Swana arrives next afternoon to propose to her champagne-hungover love rival another compromise:  Swana will hand the jewellery over provided that Ninotchka is on the next flight back to Moscow.  Ninotchka, after selling the jewels to Mercier, reluctantly does just that.

Greta Garbo, a good actress who became a great movie star, is an icon partly because her screen career didn’t last long.  She made a good few Hollywood films (Ninotchka was the last but one) but over a period of only fifteen years:  because audiences didn’t see her age significantly, Garbo’s image is preserved in amber as well as celluloid.  Melvyn Douglas’s stage and screen career lasted more than half a century.  He never seemed to go out of fashion but was never a star.  Although he had plenty of lead roles, Douglas remained essentially a character actor – which shows to great advantage in Ninotchka.  He’s able to negotiate the character shifts dictated by the story more easily than Greta Garbo.  His Léon is funny and charming in his own right, but Douglas also knows his place:  he never tries to upstage Garbo.  When Ninotchka and Léon first arrive at his apartment, they’re welcomed by his elderly butler, Gaston (Richard Carle).  Ninotchka, observing that Gaston is ‘horribly old’ and ‘looks sad’ (he doesn’t), scolds Léon – ‘You should not make him work’ – and asks, ‘Do you whip him?’  Léon replies, ‘No, though the mere thought makes my mouth water’.  Melvyn Douglas’s beautifully straight delivery of that line epitomises the quality of his performance throughout.

You can guess from her acting style that Ina Claire was renowned for her work on stage rather than screen, but her theatricality as Swana is good value.  A little of Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski goes quite a long way:  Ernst Lubitsch does well to ration their screen time.  Once they and Ninotchka are back in the USSR, the film is marking time (and the jokey military parade celebrating Stalin is another episode that’s retrospectively hard to smile at).  But this is also partly testament to the success of the film’s central romance – you’re impatient for Léon to reappear and give Ninotchka and himself the ending they deserve and we want for them.  The three clueless envoys end up in Constantinople; Commissar Razinin dispatches Ninotchka there to rescue their latest trading failure.  On arrival, she discovers they’re now running their own restaurant, trading for personal profit rather than Mother Russia’s.  When Ninotchka demands to know who’s behind this disgraceful dereliction of duty, Léon returns to the screen.  Denied a visa to enter the Soviet Union, he decided to make alternative arrangements to see Ninotchka again, conspiring with the biddable Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski to do so.  Léon asks her to stay with him and out of her homeland for good. ‘When it is a choice between my personal interest and the good of my country, how can I waver?’ she replies, ‘No one shall say Ninotchka was a bad Russian’.  She then promptly joins Léon in a conclusive clinch.  It’s a nifty ending – the West has won, communism is vanquished, Ninotchka and Léon are a happy couple.  Which left this viewer happy, too.

3 June 2026