Cinema of the Caribbean: Ninotchka

This fall, Warner Brothers will finally bring the intriguing 1939 film Ninotchka to DVD, although from what I can glean, it will not be a trumpeted release. That’s a shame - I can't think of a better candidate for a big restoration effort - My own VHS copy is gauzy white and poison green, and has a number of rough patches that could be cleaned up.

Ninotchka gained much of its popularity for events outside of its making: its star, Greta Garbo, would make only one subsequent film before retiring unexpectedly at age 36, and the onset of World War II would change the dynamic of U.S./Soviet relations, making a frankly anti-Stalinist satire like this less possible in coming years, and more valuable as film history.

The film was co-written by a team including a pre-legendary Billy Wilder and the novelist Charles Brackett. The film’s director, Ernst Lubitsch, was the object of much respect by his peers for refining a certain type of sound comedy that was neither screwball nor mannered and European - but there’s no question that his protege Billy Wilder far outclassed him both in comedy and in the all-around quality of his films. But, in fairness, much of his work is difficult to access, and unseen by me. 

The plot of Ninotchka is a sturdy enough clothesline: Three Soviet emissaries arrive in Paris with a mission to pawnsky some ill-gotten Romanov boodle, on behalf of the Kremlin. A Czarist waiter (ha) overhears the scheme and contacts an exiled Grand Duchess living in Paris, letting her know that the royal family jewels have surfaced and are about to be sold to the highest bidder.

Complications ensue and the three emissaries are informed that a special Soviet commissar is coming to assist them.....here is Garbo's memorable arrival at the Paris train station:

Buljanoff: How are things in Moscow?

Ninotchka: Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer, but better Russians.

Ninotchka: [looking at a garish hat in a shop window] What's that?

Kopalski: It's a hat comrade. A woman's hat.

Ninotchka: How can such a civilization survive.....It won't be long now, comrades.

Walking the streets of Paris, Ninotchka encounters Count Leon D'Algout (Melvyn Douglas, grandfather of IIleana, in the second of his three Garbo movies), a helpful stranger who helps her locate the Eiffel Tower on a street atlas. Only afterwards does she discover that the Count is (gasp) the very lawyer who has been hired by the Grand Duchess to litigate the jewel case! What a conundrum!

Ninotchka is a farce, not an exploration of the verities of Bolshevik praxis. But there is some meat there, for those who are interested in looking for it. I'm sure, for example, that the steely Ninotchka was based on Vera Mukhina's famous Moscow statue of the female Soviet farm worker - all biceps and superhuman will.

The film’s importance comes from the fact that it finally introduced Billy Wilder to the mass audience, and it came along at a time when the audience was ready to see some holes poked in the traditional political stereotypes that had settled into place in the 1930s. This was before the days when even Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had to be re-titled so as not to confuse America’s lumpenproletariat.

Wilder’s career is too large to summarize, especially here, but its useful to point out a common misperception. Critics often use the lazy word ‘cynical’ to describe his acidulous humor, but that’s inappropriate; Wilder typically made straight films about moral degenerates, not cynical films about upstanding citizens. Cynical would be the insincere, made-to-order blockbusters that roll off the assembly line today. I’m reminded of something Pauline Kael once said: When there is no respect on either side, commerce is a dirty word. That’s how I feel watching a lot of recent movies - dirty.

Wilder’s collaboration with the writer Charles Brackett has to be one of the more successful in the American canon: in addition to Ninotchka and the earlier Lubitsch film Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, the Brackett/Wilder team also put together Ball of Fire, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, A Foreign Affair, and one of my favorite Wilder films, Five Graves to Cairo.

Typical Wilder characters, including the ones in Ninotchka, are usually venal and endlessly corruptible; they also never allow the latest debauch to stem their politeness or humor. Wilder himself once said something along the lines of "everything is forgivable, as long as you don’t bore everyone."

By using black humor, Wilder characters also get away with the most blood-curdling threats and innuendos. My favorite scene in Ninotchka is the mock execution, which you have to see for yourself, but consider this exchange in the middle of the film, between the czarist and the revolutionary:

Duchess Swana [on Ninotchka’s outfit:] I assume this is what the factory workers wear at their dances.

Ninotchka: Exactly. It would have been very embarrassing for people of my sort to wear low-cut gowns in the old Russia. The lashes of the Cossacks [Czarist officers who terrorized Russians before the revolution] across our backs were not very becoming.

Duchess Swana: Yes, you're quite right about the Cossacks. We made a great mistake when we let them use their whips. They had such reliable guns.

Keep in mind, this is coming in the middle of fast and furious comedy; I count at least two "I vant to be alone" gags. Can you imagine a Julia Roberts film today that had gags about Julia Roberts woven into the script? In an attempt to outdo each other in maudlin sentimentality, today’s comedy directors would never consider throwing the audience an unexpected bone. After all, what do they care? They’ve already got our money.

There are also pictures of Lenin that smile back at Ninotchka, and other fourth-wall smashing gags that Wilder would come to rely on in later films like The Seven-Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. Even entire cities were not above a Wilder send-up; he would return to Paris again to film the Audrey Hepburn vehicle, Love in the Afternoon, which was deliberately made in the Lubitsch style.

Not that Ninotchka needed a remake. It had several, including one with Katherine Hepburn and Bob Hope, depending on how far you stretch the term 'remake.' In fact, Billy Wilder has probably been responsible for more remakes, attempts at, and nods to, than any other director in the last fifty years. And if you want to know what he was all about, I consider this film to be the ground floor.