Ninotchka

Ernst Lubitsch – 1939 – USA

Ernst Lubitsch was a great director, so it’s with due respect that we have to acknowledge how overwhelmingly the soul of screenwriter Billy Wilder permeates Ninotchka.  It bears all the hallmarks of Wilder’s sensibility; his biting cynicism that always makes way for a profound warmth and humanism.  His quintessential scenario involves a repressed bureaucrat or ideologue who is led to open up to the joys of life, love and art in defiance of the dictates of church and state.  Despite how well the films turned out, Wilder and his partner Charles Brackett were frustrated by their lack of control over their sublime scripts for films like Ninotchka and Ball of Fire (1942), the success of which gave them the power to continue writing what they wanted but with Wilder now directing and Bracket producing, starting with The Major and the Minor (1942) and continuing through a string of classics such as The Lost Weekend (1945), A Foreign Affair (1948) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).  “Garbo laughs!” boasted the ads for Ninotchka.  The presence of Greta Garbo is so perfect and fits so well into Wilder’s future pattern of ironic or even symbolic casting that it’s hard to believe he didn’t have some input in her participation.  Like Gloria Swanson coming out of retirement to star in Sunset Boulevard or the self-referential appearances of Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair and Marilyn Monroe in The Seven-Year Itch (1955), Garbo is used not only as an actress but as a means for critiquing her own persona.  With the world on the brink of war during its production, Ninotchka took a boldly anti-partisan stand, presenting Stalinism as callous, bleak and humorless.  Chaplin’s equally humanist protest against Nazism in the following year’s The Great Dictator does the same thing.  Neither film is American propaganda, of which there was certainly no shortage at the time, but they are both pleas for sanity and humanity at a time when madmen were heads-of-state and murdering millions in war and purges.