Cluny Brown (1946)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Cluny Brown (1946) – E. Lubitsch

The final film that Lubitsch completed before his death by heart attack, Cluny Brown is a gently amusing comedy buoyed by a delightful performance by Charles Boyer (playing a Czech refugee from the Nazis despite his unmistakably French accent).  Jennifer Jones (borrowed from Selznick) plays the title character, an irrepressible maid cum plumber who has a sense of wonder and joy about everything.  This approach (and the similarly direct responses of Boyer) flies in the face of the restrictive social structure – neither Jones nor Boyer properly fit into either the Upstairs or Downstairs environments.  Even the pretentious middle classes have no room for Cluny who doesn’t seem to “know her place”.  As always with Lubitsch, there are a lot of wry chuckles on offer here, some of them verging on double entendres, and more often than not, it is the script that heightens the humorousness of the situations rather than the context being funny on its own.  Moreover, the excellent array of character actors in bit parts enlivens everything. All that said, this one probably doesn’t reach the heights of Lubitsch’s best work (The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, Trouble in Paradise) but it is a very pleasant diversion.