Popular reviews

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  Review by vincent price was 6′4″ ★★★★½ 2

  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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  Review by Alice Stoehr ★★★★

  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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  Review by vincent price was 6′4″ ★★★★½ 2

  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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  Review by Leonora Anne Mint ★★★★½

  Everyone deserves someone who'll tell them that pursuing their passions makes them more desirable, not less.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 6

  “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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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

  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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  Review by eely 🌻 ★★★★

  get you a man who throws your ugly maid uniform out the window of a moving train!!!

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  Review by Will Steele ★★★★½

  “Are you the type of man who puts on his pants before he answers the telephone?”

  Romanticism meets antiquation. Austerity meets frivolity. Cluny meets Belinski. Ernst Lubitsch greeted the postwar dawn with this quaint comedy of the utmost earnestness. He epitomised the absurdity of moralistic society like few other artists of his era, perhaps only paralleled by his contemporary and former collaborator Billy Wilder. They shared an admiration for hopelessly imperfect people and the art of indecision. Both steeped their stories in sentimentality reaping pathos from serendipity. In their kingdoms, the interloper reigned supreme. They made the ridiculous meticulous, and for that they win my heart over and over.

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  Review by nora ★★★★½

  i've been starved for 40s comedies recently and this is so uncynical and lovely!!! i was in love from the moment jennifer jones had two cocktails and announced that "that persian cat feeling" was coming over her. only lubitsch could pull off having a main character who is uninhibitedly fascinated by plumbing :') just delightful in every way

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  Review by Chris ★★★★

  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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  Review by M_Penalosa ★★★★

  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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  Review by Carlos Valladares ★★★★½

  Lubitsch's final masterpiece, a bang and a whimper, the slow Raphaelson grace meets the casual screwball of To Be Or Not To Be, with Jennifer Jones channeling Ossi-Pola-Miriam in her own vivacious woman who society doesn't know what to do with.

  "In Hyde Park, 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?" That's Lubitsch in a nutshell.

  Who are we to say that Cluny Brown's class-disruptive hankering for plumbing or Design for Living's final coupling are unnatural, that the Heaven Can Wait rake can't wait to go to heaven, that the To Be Or Not To Be actors…