Ninotchka (1939) – 1.

As a film comedy, Ninotchka is as close to perfect as the Hollywood studio system could ever produce. As an event — the conjunction of Garbo, Lubitsch, Brackett and Wilder, and MGM — it’s almost supernatural. As a Hollywood product, it’s that exceedingly rare thing: it’s a unique comedy. It’s both a loving parody of its Olympian star’s body of work and a sincere, even brave out-of-the-box performance by that same star. It’s also a sustained torrent of Jewish, Russian, and Soviet (and Jewish-Russian-Soviet) humor. The fact that its star was Garbo, one of the least humorous actors of her age, is incredible. That she is brilliantly funny, even more so. That its satire is delivered equally against Communism and the “free market,” and that both are also defended acutely, leaving audiences with a political Rorschach comedy, is brilliant. And that the script, one of the most dazzling Hollywood ever produced, was written by a committee of four men (albeit four geniuses — Wilder, Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Lubitsch), well… With just a few breaks — a better male lead, a little less pandering to its star, a tighter second half — it might have also have been a perfect comedy. But that could not have happened. The things that make it great as a movie — Garbo’s blinding celebrity, Lubitsch’s cheerful petit bourgeois sensibility, and the Hollywood star system — blunted what could have been a truly philosophically political comedy.

More than any other film in this period, my personal relationship with Ninotchka influences my interpretation. It was the only American comedy of the era that my family ever cared about, other than Chaplin’s. My parents, exiled by the Communists (though for democratic, not royalist, tendencies), loved the film. Like their whole generation, they were entranced by Garbo, but it was the Commissar-meets-Paris action that enthralled them. My parents knew commissars. They knew royalists. They knew Paris. And they knew the hilariously dark joke culture under Communism. No other film made jokes about all of them. The film was actually banned in France as being hostile to Communism, while any self-respecting socialist saw in it also a brutal send-up of unearned privilege. No other film even acknowledged the comedy of the basic premise: the absurd collision of puritanical ideological revolution and the core-deep corruption of the ancien regime. My parents didn’t even consider Ninotchka an American film.

The story of an ambassador from a backwater post-revolutionary country to the City of Lights is a version of the archetypal peasant-goes-to-the-capital story, with a distinctively modern edge. Since it’s usually the demi-sophisticated and half-educated sons that are entrusted with foreign missions, they are expected to know some of the core manners of the foreign courts. The more manners they know, the more temptations are on offer. And when the peasants are true-believer innocents, things get even more complicated. The boors and puritans can get stars in their eyes. This should be a core satirical story for laggard nations in modern times; think of a Taliban junior secretary in Manhattan. I don’t actually know of many such satires, but spy fiction is full of vulnerable innocents. And foreign-service community gossip is an inexhaustible well of them. Consider the recent case of the Hungarian MEP to the EU, a founding member of the ruling Fidesz Party, a conservative ideologue and author of a strict gender-restrictive family law, who was apprehended by police in Brussels attempting to flee a gay orgy during Covid lockdown, caught naked as he descended a drainpipe. Since then, a political opponent has campaigned regularly brandishing a section of drainpipe.

Depicting a doctrinaire Communist comedically in Hollywood at the time wasn’t unique to Ninotchka. We see it in the Bolshevik chauffeur of LaCava’s Fifth-Avenue Girl in the same year, in Alexander Hall’s inversion of Ninotchka, He Stayed For Breakfast, in the following year, and in Gregory Ratoff’s vulgarized and Americanized — but still very funny — B-version, Public Deb No. 1. Many film historians believe Frank Capra provided the green-light for political comedy with his populist turn, which reached its fervid acme in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, released barely a month after Ninotchka. What’s surprising, and distinctive, about Lubitsch’s film is its urbanity and generosity, eschewing all the knockabout farce and hysterical moralizing of the more American-oriented capitalist apologias. William Paul, in his book Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, which includes one of the best commentaries I’ve read on Ninotchka, likens it to Molière’s Misanthrope. In both, a philosophically humorless but intelligent and sincere character who is capable of sharp critical insight but lacks self-reflection into their own contradictions is presented sympathetically. Molière’s Alceste is a noble churl, who can be redeemed only by friends and potential lovers who see his inner nobility and care for him. Lubitsch rotates the noble churl through the paradigm of romantic comedy. When Nina Ivanovna Yakushova’s inner romantic is unleashed by Leon, she appears at first to renounce her rigid idealism. Some fans read it that way. The beauty of her character, though, and of the script, is that, in the end, she retains much of her idealism in her romantic heart. She’s complicated. Unlike every other character in Lubitsch’s earlier work, she lives in social history like a fish in water. She breaches the surface now and then, but there’s no living outside the water. Until the end, that is.

The script was conceived for Garbo even before Lubitsch was hired to direct it. Garbo was the least likely actress for a Lubitsch film. She hadn’t played a comedy before, and she was so pathologically insecure that she was incapable of making fun of herself or appearing silly. As MGM’s grandest star she secured all sorts of contractual concessions. For one, she could choose her directors. Originally, Ninotchka was to be directed by George Cukor, who had directed her in Camille some years earlier. When Cukor backed out, she insisted on either Edmund Goulding, who directed her in Grand Hotel, or Lubitsch. She wanted to be directed by an artist. She also secured the right to back out of production basically for any reason — a right she almost enjoyed, if not for Lubitsch’s own skillful personal diplomacy. (For what it’s worth, there are conflicting reports about her relationship with Lubitsch. Some people claim that she looked down on him and considered him vulgar; others, that she loved working with him. Her performance, and this photo, which I saw for the first time only recently, make me think the latter is more likely.)

Before getting into the film’s beauties, here’s what I think is its one great flaw — and why the flaw was written in the film’s DNA.

It begins with Melvyn Douglas’s Leon. I know Douglas was a noble human being and a good dramatic actor; still, I’m not fond of Douglas as a comedian. For much of the ’30s and early ’40s, MGM typed him as the debonair leading man in romantic comedies, a version of William Powell, cosmopolitan, intelligent, impeccably smooth. (Originally, Powell himself was contracted to play Leon; when he withdrew because of illness, Lubitsch offered the role to Cary Grant, and then Gary Cooper. I’ve often imagined Powell in Leon’s role. Grant might have worked. Cooper, inconceivable.) Many folks have noted that Douglas’s Leon lacks erotic magnetism that might counterbalance his dandy decadence or his excessively complacent screen presence. Leon’s smooth urbanity is never frayed. He’s less an enthralling lover than a middle-aged roué grooming a conquista, more a younger Adophe Menjou than a Tyrone Power.

We see a rogue fascinated by an exotic, gorgeous, incorruptible innocent. What’s more, it’s not even entirely his own affect. Leon is a cluster of comically parodistic quotations from some archetype of a Garbo film. His character is essentially a parody — though certainly a benevolent one — of traits emanating from Garbo’s star persona. Ninotchka is, from one perspective, a magnificent parody of Garbo performed by Garbo. It includes, famously, many explicitly parodistic moments from her former films and public persona — from her “Do you want to be alone? No!” to her Camille-like sacrifice of Leon. In this later phase of her career and celebrity, all of Garbo’s films were somewhat parasitical on her previous films. Hollywood’s whole star system relied on stars essentially parodying what made them popular in the first place. But Ninotchka‘s Garbo parodies are wonderfully comic, integral to the comic design. Her tragic archetype is given a new dimension by being played out in an unserious genre and setting. The balance between parodistic humor and comedy is finely tuned throughout the film. I’m not sure same can be said about Leon’s character.

William Daniels was the behind the camera in all of these films, as he was for all of Garbo’s MGM movies. Lubitsch, though, is having fun with this requisite bedazzled reverse shot and Garbo’s taking control of her kisses. I’m willing to concede that for an audience familiar with Garbo’s films, these parodistic scenes might have added to the comedy — Garbo playing against type while simultaneously playing her signature scenes. And Leon in that case becomes a humorously superficial, outclassed version of John Gilbert. Very outclassed. It isn’t Leon who is affecting her; he’s simply an emanation of Garbo herself.

And that’s really what Ninotchka is about. Garbo gets to play Garbo, and Lubitsch makes her funny. But by building the world around a serious Bolshevik in 1939 — serious, because Garbo would never play a hypocrite –, the stakes of the game were raised. The film is filled with funny satirical gags at the expense of ideologies, but the writers also punctuate the dialogue with steep political points. It’s no wonder that some audiences see it as a satire of Communism, others of capitalist parasites. All the characters seem to know their political economy, even if just to make fun of it. (Again, in sharp contrast to Lubitsch’s earlier films.) Since we have to take Nina’s sincerity seriously, as well as Countess Swana’s commitment to the ancien regime, the parasite dandy Leon also acquires a position, despite himself.

The central drama is that Nina undergoes a conversion of sorts. So does Countess Swana when she decides to value Leon more than her ancestral jewels. Leon should, following the logic of the comic design, undergo one with them. Most commentators believe he does: into a devoted lover, willing to extract his love from her dour country and to stake her friends’ Constantinople restaurant. But what does he convert from? After all, he’s the one who inspires Nina to change. What were the virtues that made Nina feel so much joy that she wavers in her commitment to humanity and social justice? What are Leon’s qualities that give her insight into her own inflexibility?

The plot sets Leon up for a conversion equal to Nina’s own, but we don’t see it happen. Where we see Nina’s strict soul gradually melt with joy, liberated by Paris, sex, and champagne, we might expect Leon to develop a more responsible sense of social morality. That’s not quite what happens, because it was never about politics or commitments — politics was always a pretext for comedy. That’s the Lubitsch dimension. And the comedy was also a pretext for romance — the Garbo dimension.

Leon and Nina are at first set up to represent two equal composite forces, both equally imperfect morally, but “justifiable”: sacrificial commitment vs. carefree play, straight talk vs. seductive indirection, no-nonsense vs. nonsense, social justice vs. hedonistic pleasure seeking, Moscow 1939 vs. … Hollywood. It should be Moscow vs. Paris, but of course it’s Lubitsch’s Paris, constructed on an MGM soundstage. (Moscow is imaginary, too, but much closer to the real one.) Leon is hilariously, playfully bedazzled by Nina in their world-historical cute meet. He is set up to represent Paris (it’s sometimes hard to remember that he’s a French aristocrat — Count Leon d’Algout — not an American. He’s not a businessman, he’s Old Money, sans the money). He’s a dandy, a kept man, a roué. Their banter promises equal give and take down the line. They’re both good at repartee. She can puncture his smug dalliance with no-nonsense truth.

NINA: I have heard of the arrogant male in capitalistic society. It is having a superior earning power that makes you that way.

He can puncture her smug morality with ironic nonsense.

LEON: A Russian! I love Russians! Comrade, I’ve been fascinated by your five-year plan for the last fifteen years.

Guess what? Nina is right but it’s not applicable to the situation. Leon doesn’t have a profession (he’s either an amateur lawyer or a con-artist); his earning power comes from being Countess Swana’s kept man. He’s a worse sort of parasite from Nina’s perspective than the normal capitalist male. It’s his freedom as a gigolo and a well-connected but penniless aristocrat that underwrites his arrogance. (Nina, by contrast, does have earning power; she’s a trusted supervisory envoy of her state.) As these two humorous political-economic positions collide, we expect some minimal parallelism of conversions, a meeting in the middle so beloved by romantic comedies. Leon’s putative conversion happens (if it does at all) out of sight. His butler, Gaston (Richard Carle), informs us that Leon now has Marx on his bed table. For all Leon’s snappy talk about collective finances, though, his butler knows he’s still a deadbeat.

Leon’s weakness as a character is clearly not just a problem of Douglas’s performance. Leon is an emanation of Garbo’s and the Lubitsch team’s (and of course the studio’s) conception of a political comedy — its resolution can only be anti-political. Leon’s strength in the character matrix is that he has no political or ideological allegiances at all. Other than Nina, none of the other characters ever treat him as a suspect hypocrite or exploiter. But then, it’s really only Nina that counts and only she has the moral weaponry to challenge him. Instead of challenging, she unilaterally disarms herself. Her sincerity and seriousness — the very things that so attracted Leon to her — are transferred away from “the people” to one person, from the world’s happiness to her own. In the political-economic sphere that remains, the sharp (and deadly) collision of the dictatorship of the proletariat and capitalism is won by mysterious funding and petite bourgeois small businessmen who just want to get along and delay the revolution. It is the inevitable resolution to the questions: “What would Lubitsch do?”, “What would Garbo do?”, and “What would MGM do?”

All this is set up by the film’s structure: two distinct halves + festive resolution. The first half is brilliant satirical comedy and ensemble play about the clash of two illusory utopias; the second dissolves into a giddy, yet sardonic reprise of Camille. The former crackles with repartee, comic timing, high-speed verbal play, and fine Lubitschean mise-en-scène and camera play; the latter descends into dyad scenes in which Nina becomes Ninotchka and plays the diva, and Leon plays the player, still. The Moscow scenes have been criticized as downbeat and melancholic, redeemed ex machina by Leon’s ministrations and Constantinople. (We’ll always have Constantinople.) I like them. They are realistic for anyone who has lived in or heard tales of socially reorganized apartments in the Soviet world; and they authentically satisfy the archetypal comic requirement of having a banquet at the point of resolution — in this case, the collective omelette party. Still, the significance of Constantinople is never made clear — maybe contemporary audiences were well aware that that city, the most international and multicultural in the world, no longer existed. Since 1926, it was Istanbul. Nina and her charges have decamped for Brigadoon. So then, what “position” did Leon represent? Answer: Hollywood. He successfully extracted Nina and established her friendly chorus-clowns in the only world where Hollywood believes the world-political conflict can be resolved: the movies. (Let’s be clear that we are left without knowing where Leon, who can’t pay his butler’s wages and has presumably cut ties with his benefactress Countess Swana, got the money to stake the boys. It’s not until The Shop Around the Corner in the following year that Lubitsch includes characters who actually work for a living.)

So let’s recap the political-economic contours of Ninotchka‘s fictional world. Leon is a courtly parasite lacking a court, living off a displaced countess who herself has no real wealth, only pretensions and habits of domination. Apparently, her only prospect of wealth in her exile is to sell her history of privilege as a commodity to the vulgar, sensationalist capitalist press. The Soviet system, for its part, is impoverished, near starvation, selling historical treasures it considers worthless to its own ideology, but valued as commodities to the luxe regime of the capitalists. Countess Swana’s parasitical exiled aristocracy, now with nothing but prestige and without means to control others’ labor for their own benefit, levitate over a vacuum of speculation, the sale of the past, and debt. (Leon is part of this aristocracy of debt — he can’t pay his own butler.) Okay, so what is the source of the wealth we see in Paris, the grand hotels on the abyss? The only “indigenous” capitalist we encounter in the film is the jeweler buying the jewels from the Soviet clowns, who claims his offer would mean a loss for him, spurring Buljanov to note wryly: ” Capitalistic methods. They accumulate millions by taking loss after loss.” And “Constantinople?” Some get happiness, and some get class struggle. Oh, well.

In this entry I’ve focused on my critiques of the story’s petite bourgeois mentality. In another one, I want to focus on the film’s beauties, its dense web of jokes that represent a different — but in many ways complementary — mentality: the humor of the oppressed. Arguably, more than any other American comedy of the era, even by Lubitsch, Ninotchka creates its comedy out of twisty jokes. Tellingly, the film closes by repurposing the comic trickery of the joke that opens it.

KOPALSKI: Look, Buljanoff, if Lenin were alive, he would say: "Buljanoff, comrade,for once in your life you're in Paris. Don't be a fool. Go in there and ring three times."
IRANOFF: He wouldn't say that. What he would say is:"You can't afford to live in a cheap hotel." Doesn't the prestige of the Bolsheviks mean anything to you? "Do you want to live in a hotel where you press for the hot water and cold water comes and when you press for cold water,nothing comes at all?" Phooey, Buljanoff.
BULJANOFF: I still say our place is with the common people. But who am I to contradict Lenin? 

Here, it’s one of a torrent of jokes that are simultaneously about the envoys’ peasant-logic in persuading Buljanoff that their comfort is required by Soviet prestige, and also the more urbane logic that Lenin could be invoked for any purpose at all — as he indeed was by the apparatchiks and propaganda services. In the end, it turns out to be the governing joke of the film itself.

Politically, intellectually, philosophically cynical, the joke is also of a piece with most of the others in this film of wonderful jokes. It’s a joke of the oppressed, using the language of the oppressors against themselves. While Ninotchka is certainly an affirmation of petite bourgeois anti-politics, on another level it is a showcase of the East European-Jewish culture of the humor of the oppressed. For me, that’s what makes Ninotchka beautiful, and reflects some glory onto the petite bourgeoisie, too.