The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Lubitsch’s late series of masterworks, [including] To Be or Not to Be and Cluny Brown, stand as one of the enduring glories of the American cinema.”

Dave Kehr, The New York Times

Ernst Lubitsch’s final film sets two social misfits loose in pre-WWII London, a class-stratified city happy to let its working class worry about the future. After meeting over a clogged kitchen sink, writer Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer) and plumbing apprentice Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) find themselves at the mercy of a wealthy family. Lubitsch grants his heroes the space to deliver private twists of language intelligible only to each other, in the form of explicit entendres, colloquial wisdom, and sheer nonsense. Unlike the romantic universes of most Lubitsch films, here the upper and working class exist on completely separate planes of comedy, a dynamic that renders a marriage plot the height of triviality, and the sparks between Cluny and Adam an uninhibited riot of kitten purrs, secret pacts, and seismic plumbing repairs. Lubitsch’s closing images, rendered sans dialogue, exemplify his art, containing a joke, an artistic statement, and a personal, private meaning.

“If Hollywood has made another film with as detailed a depiction of class difference and class coexistence as Cluny Brown, I can’t think of it offhand … [A film of] extraordinary delicacy … Though it is a love story, Cluny diverts its romantic plot so that it flows in an almost subterranean course through satirical terrain.”

Dan Sallitt, MUBI Notebook

“Ranks among [Lubitsch’s] very finest.”

Nick Pinkerton, Artforum