Synopsis
Amateur plumber Cluny Brown gets sent off by her uncle to work as a servant at an English country estate.
Cluny Brown
1946 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch
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Popular reviews
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I think the reason why I love this film so much is that it’s so unapologetic in the way it rejects any hint of cynicism. Cluny, so uncertain and so unguarded, is allowed to be herself the whole way through, and the story doesn’t try to change her in order to make her desirable to men. It doesn’t disparage her interests and hobbies, it doesn’t present her as an object to be mocked or ridiculed. The characters in the story either accept her, or they don’t, but she doesn’t change in service of a cheap punchline. She is, simply, herself.
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A few years ago, I wrote the following about a monologue delivered by Greta Garbo in Ninotchka: "[I]t deftly combines pathos and humor, but doesn’t compromise either of them. It’s just as funny as it is sad, and it’s very sad." I added that Garbo "takes her role just as seriously as if she were playing Camille or Anna Karenina." Well, many of the same observations apply just as readily to Lubitsch's Cluny Brown. Star Jennifer Jones may have effervescence where Garbo had gravitas, but her character's internal life is allotted just as much respect by both actress and director as Ninotchka's was. Cluny's passions may be ridiculous, but they're still her passions, and the film takes them seriously even…
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Do you ever just feel so thoroughly comforted by a movie? I just want to watch and rewatch Cluny Brown endlessly. Like, Charles Boyer has a monologue in this film about plumbing, and it’s one of the most romantic lines of dialogue I’ve ever heard. Seriously.
4.25/5
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Everyone deserves someone who'll tell them that pursuing their passions makes them more desirable, not less.
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“Cluny Brown” is a love triangle of a film involving a man, a woman, and an idea. The idea is ‘home;’ a concept so intensely desired that it is without fault or fallibility.
Director Ernst Lubitsch’s last completed movie, “Cluny” sees the borders of the fabled Lubitschland breached by the impending outbreak of WWII. The contained manors of his earlier works are less of an island and more a harbor from the danger closing in around England.
Charles Boyer plays a Czech professor turned refugee from the Nazi front, who finds himself a guest at the same country manor as Jennifer Jones’ Cluny Brown; a maid with spunk unbefitting of her lot in life.
The two are, much like Lubitsch…
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get you a man who throws your ugly maid uniform out the window of a moving train!!!
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After the more epically scaled Heaven Can Wait, Lubitsch concluded his career with one of his most supple works, a perfect sublimation of his sexualized class comedies in which a plumbing-obsessed flibbertigibbet enjoys a sense of camaraderie with an anti-Nazi Czech. Along the way, Lubitsch mines their interests for double-entendre comedy, as ever, but he also demonstrates the somber aspects of hidebound class structures. The two scenes in which Cluny (played to earnest perfection by Jones) is humiliated for daring not to "know her place" are more savagely heartrending than anything else in the director's filmography.
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I love the way Charles Boyer says 'Cluny Brown' when he sees Jennifer Jones in the movie. It's like he's discovering something new each time he says it. And every time he says it I smile.
If I had known Boyer I would've changed my name to Cluny Brown, just to hear him say it whenever he greeted me.
The film was a real fuck you to the British upper classes, suggesting that they were out of touch with the dangers that Hitler posed before WWII. It was quite popular in the US, but in the UK not so much. It caused such an uproar that C. Aubrey Smith, an actor who personifies the old-timey British upper class for me and who has a small part here, actually apologized for being in the film.
But really it's such a likable film. Jones is wonderfully funny, and Boyer's trolling of the local chemist is worth a watch alone.
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I always knew that Ernst Lubitsch was a genius. But I didn't know he could do the impossible: in the last film he lived to see completed, he guided Jennifer Jones, my least-favorite movie star of the 1940s, to a performance of absolute sublimity, with a fizzy waifish innocence rubbing shoulders with sharp, sublimated pain and embarrassment. She does this in the body of a more melancholic and sensitive version of the traditional screwball heroine, spiked with a more openly radical, dangerous transgressive quality than any of them. I consider myself properly abashed, and though one great performance isn't enough to wipe the slate clean of all those blandly earnest turns in the likes of Since You Went Away and…
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In Lubitsch's first five sound films, someone opens and closes a door every 60 seconds. But here in his last film, he introduces comedy as still life.
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“Are you the type of man who puts on his pants before he answers the telephone?”
That Ernst Lubitsch must’ve been one charming rascal, eh? It’s like he had a certain deftness about him; an ineffable, intangible something that he brought to all his projects. Somebody should come up with a term to describe that.
Jennifer Jones is a little overmatched by the material here; she doesn’t appear to have much of a facility for this kind of snappy dialogue. But every other element of this screwball comedy of manners is so effortlessly effervescent that it hardly seems to matter. I don’t think Charles Boyer spoke a single line of dialogue that didn’t at least bring a smile to my…
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i cried when andrew scolded cluny.
all any of us want is to be accepted not in spite of our faults, but to find someone who will love us truthfully and completely. cluny and belinski, although both quite eccentric, love every part of each other. there's nothing more beautiful in romance than that.