Cinema of the World

Description:
This late, delicious comedy of manners by Ernst Lubitsch is a notch below his best, but the character acting is so good one hardly notices. A plumber's daughter (Jennifer Jones) and a refugee (Charles Boyer) meet in England prior to World War II, and Una O'Connor, Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Reginald Gardiner, C. Aubrey Smith, Reginald Owen, and Richard Haydn are around to take up what slack there is. This 1946 film is the last one Lubitsch completed.

Let it be noted at the outset that Ernst Lubitsch has come up with a delectable and sprightly lampoon in "Cluny Brown," which on Saturday, began a pleasant visit at the Rivoli. And, let is be known also, that from this vantage point, the offering is among the year's most delightful film comedies. For, from this adaptation of Margery Sharp's best-selling novel, Mr. Lubitsch has produced and directed his most gayly irreverent escapade since "Ninotchka" of fond memory. As presnted here, Cluny Brown's partial biography is no starkly factual file but is a tongue-in-cheek, double-entendre tale of an ebullient lass whose affections are divided equally between plumbing crises and affairs of the heart. And Cluny, as well as the fans she is likely to have, can be grateful to Mr. Lubitsch and Twentieth Century-Fox for having put the crises and the affairs together so charmingly.

Samuel Hoffenstein and Elizabeth Reinhardt have fashioned a screen play which does not hew to the letter of the book but cleaves to its spirit. And, while the laughter which is distilled is not abdominal, it is continuous. Miss Sharp provided a panel of extraordinary and amiable people, and the director and the scenarists have not let her down. In dialogue and situations they are still the same lighthearted crew but with some whimsical variations. Cluny, for instance, is still the same, flighty, day-dreaming neice of a London plumber who admittedly doesn't know her place. And it is on this quiet Sunday in 1939 while surreptitiously substituting for her guardian, that Cluny meets Adam Belinski, the improvident and charming Czech refugee author and patriot. And, caught as she is in what appears to be a compromising position, what can her uncle do but ship her off to service on the estate of Sir Henry Carmel?

The landed gentry have little effect, however, on either Cluny or Belinski, who, it appears, is the guest of the heir of the house, and, who, like Cluny, is an individualist. Together they neatly disrupt the serenity of the household. Cluny drops the roast and falls in love with the village pharmacist. Belinski, deeply enamored of Cluny, serves as a philosopher and cupid to his young host and his fiancee, the beautiful and haughty Betty Cream. And, when they depart, happily on their way toward marriage, Cluny and Adam are still un-reconstructed, but everyone from Sir Henry on down to Syrett, the butler, have been genially impressed.

Bare plot lines, however, are meager and unrewarding. Dialogue and direction transform Jennifer Jones into the renegade Cluny, who can't resist a stuffed drain or the austere courtship of Mr. Wilson, the pharmacist. Her performance is opposite and qualitatively equal to her delineation of St. Bernadette, for which she captured the Academy's statuette. Charles Boyer, never before distinguished as a comedian, contributes all the laughs, genuine charm and dubious philosophy called for in the role of Adam Belinski, an engaging chap, whose friends can always prod him into borrowing twenty pounds.

From among his supporting players Mr. Lubitsch has mined a humorous bonanza, especially in the case of Richard Haydn. His portrait of the pompous pharmacist, given to adenoidal discourses, meticulously enunciated, is the film's comic high mark. Una O'Connor, as his indigent mother, hasn't a line to speak, but makes her raucous throat-clearing expressive and funny. Reginald Owen, as the lord of the manor who vaguely recalls Hitler as "the chap who wrote that book, 'My Camp'"; Sara Allgood and Ernest Cossart, as rigidly correct servants; Margaret Bannerman, as the lady of the household; Peter Lawford, as her son, and Helen Walker, as his reluctant fiancee, and Reginald Gardiner and Sir C. Aubrey Smith, both of whom play bit parts, add to the frivolous goings-on. To repeat, apart from the landed gentry and the plumbing fraternity, whose stuffiness kids, "Cluny Brown" is gentle ribbing which should be enjoyed by most persons.





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