It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades To start with a story about the 1948 Italian elections: Italian communists made several attempts to forestall the showing of Ninotchka, including threatening movie-theatre 01/15 managers if they did not remove it from programmes and stealing copies from cinemas. When Russia’s embassy asked the Rome authorities in early April to take Ninotchka out of the city’s ten theatres in which it had been showing for several weeks, the publicity probably added to the film’s nationwide success. “What licked us Aaron Schuster was Ninotchka,” one disappointed Communist party functionary is reported to have said when the pro-Soviet left was Communist defeated at the polls, and the main anti- communist party, the Christian Democrats, Ninotchka gained an absolute majority in the new parliament. “Greta Garbo Wins Elections,” proclaimed one conservative newspaper.1 First released eighty years ago, in 1939, Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka is a singular romantic comedy, dealing with relations between East and West, communism and capitalism, love and politics – and one particularly momentous laugh. The film certainly doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of the USSR: belying its light, witty atmosphere, the comedy abounds in references to executions, forced confessions, censorship, and the Gulag. While underlining the dire conditions of the Soviet Union, it showcases r Western prosperity in the form of glamorous e t s Parisian life. Yet despite its (remarkably u h c effective) anti-communist satire – as the Italian S n story illustrates, Ninotchka was used as a o r a propaganda tool in the Cold War – there is A Ê another “red” thread going through the film. 9 1 0 Lubitsch’s treatment of communism is far more 2 r e nuanced than Garbo’s “election victory” would b o t suggest. Indeed, many of the film’s best jokes are c o directed against capitalists and aristocrats, and a k — h Ninotchka, despite the transformation she 3 c 0 t 1 o undergoes, never repudiates her dedication to n # i l N the communist cause. Far from the Soviet a t n r s i heroine simply abandoning her political ideals u n o j u after falling for a Western gigolo, and by x m u l m f extension, the West itself, the film proposes – as o - e C improbable as this sounds – a kind of screwball communism, which sets Ninotchka’s revolutionary commitments in a sympathetic light (James Harvey calls her “the closest thing to a convincing socialist heroine the English- speaking cinema has yet produced”).2 This complex and original depiction of communism – as we shall see, the comedy works on multiple levels – is what makes Ninotchka such 10.09.19 / 16:56:36 EDT 02/15 Film still from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 movieÊNinotchka, starring Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, andÊIna Claire. 10.09.19 / 16:56:36 EDT compelling viewing today. And insofar as the ridiculous funnel-shaped hat. Regarding the odd politics of comedy has become a pressing issue, fashion accessory with disdain, she delivers a Lubitsch’s cinema can again provide a valuable damning verdict: “How can such a civilization lesson.3 At a time when power appears more and survive which permits women to put things like more as a derisory comedy, an obscene parody of that on their heads? It won’t be long now, itself, with political satirists hardly able to keep comrades” – the latter line a neat profession of up, aren’t we in desperate need of a “Lubitsch faith in the iron law of History. If the hat is a touch”? 03/15 symbol of the decadence of capitalist civilization ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊTo briefly recount the plot: Ninotchka is the and its inevitable doom, later in the film it story of the unlikely romance between Comrade acquires a very different meaning. After falling Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, a Soviet envoy sent for Leon, Ninotchka goes back to the store and from Moscow to Paris to oversee the sale of purchases the reviled hat, which has now precious jewelry in order to raise badly needed become the symbol of – what? Ninotchka’s money for the state, and Count Leon d’Algout, a feminine vanity? Her new taste for Parisian style? charming ne’er-do-well and kept man of the An openness to gaiety and romance? Or, in a Grand Duchess Swana, an exiled Russian more socialist vein, has the geometrical noblewoman who happens to be the previous headpiece become her comrade object?4 The hat owner of the jewels. Ninotchka is played by Greta is a classic Lubitsch touch, portraying Garbo with her signature distance and feminine Ninotchka’s transformation through the mystique. She is intelligent, totally dedicated, vicissitudes of a single object. Yet, when she and highly capable – unlike her bumbling tries her new purchase on in the mirror, she comrades Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski who cannot quite recognize herself in it; it retains its nearly botch the sale due to Leon’s clever fundamental emptiness. It would be too easy to manipulations and the hedonistic attractions of see in Ninotchka’s fashion makeover an embrace Parisian life. But Ninotchka too is soon thrown of the formerly doomed capitalism. Instead, in a off balance by the debonair Westerner and the more elusive manner, the hat symbolizes the loss charmed world he represents; eventually her of her rigid bureaucratic socialist identity, cold Soviet exterior is cracked and she falls head without however crowning a new Western over heels in love with him. She is not the only consumerist one. one to undergo a change: Leon also acts ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊReading Capital strangely out of character, his frivolous playboy ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAs much as Ninotchka undergoes a persona giving way to a newfound sincerity and transformation, so too does Leon. Not only does devotion – and interest in Marxism. Jealous of he fall completely under Ninotchka’s spell, he Leon’s affair with the Bolshevik beauty, Swana starts reading Marx and even confronts his maneuvers to steal the jewels, and then offers personal butler about relations of economic them back to Ninotchka in exchange for her r exploitation. The irony is that the butler is e t leaving Paris and Leon for good. Though s positively repelled by his employer’s leftist talk. u h heartbroken, Ninotchka does not hesitate: she c “May I add, sir, that it was with great amazement S dutifully takes the plane to Moscow, then drowns n that I found a copy of Karl Marx’s Capital on your o r her sorrow in work. The final twist comes when a night table. That is a socialistic volume which I A Ê her superior, Commissar Razinin, sends her on a refuse to so much as dust, sir. I view with alarm, 9 1 new assignment abroad. Buljanoff, Iranoff, and 0 sir, the influence over you of this Bolshevik lady.” 2 r Kopalski, now on a fur-trading mission in e As a sidenote, this is an interesting sociological b o Constantinople, are up to their old hijinks, and he t observation that runs across Lubitsch’s films: c o wants Ninotchka to investigate. She begs him not servants take more pride in their position and a k — to make her go, but his decision is final. Little h have a stricter sense of class hierarchy than 3 c 0 t 1 does she know that the whole affair is Leon’s o aristocrats. In Cluny Brown (1946), for example, it n # i l cunning plan to get her out of the USSR, with the N is the domestics, Syrette and Mrs. Maile, who a t n r s help of her three comrades’ bad behavior. i insist on respecting traditions and minding one’s u n o j u Ninotchka arrives in Constantinople to discover proper place, while the upper class are willing to x m u l m that Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski have opened f tolerate transgressions and make jokes about o - a Russian restaurant there and intend to stay, e C their status. and she is happily reunited with Leon. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe Leninist Kiss ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn order to get a sense of the film’s ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAfter a night on the town Leon takes an ideological complexity, let us begin by looking at inebriated Ninotchka back to her hotel room, a few key instances of how it treats capitalism, where they continue the party. Before leaving, he communism, and aristocracy. lays her on the bed and gives her a goodnight ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe Hat kiss. Though it is easy to miss, the visual ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAfter Ninotchka’s arrival in Paris, she composition of the kiss is very deliberate. In the passes by a shop window display containing a background, perfectly posed between the lovers’ 10.09.19 / 16:56:36 EDT Page from the periodicalÊPicturegoer, (Jan 27, 1940),Êp.Ê8. Image: Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive. 10.09.19 / 16:56:36 EDT 05/15 Film still from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 movieÊNinotchka. 10.09.19 / 16:56:36 EDT faces, is a framed portrait of Lenin. To gives it to her as a wedding present. Despite its paraphrase Jean Genet: “But what exactly is a real and sentimental value, Ninotchka easily couple? First of all, how many is it?” Lubitsch’s parts with her property. If communism is equated answer is that it takes three to make a couple: with informants and state surveillance, it is also Leon, Ninotchka, and Lenin (indeed, this associated with the spirit of generosity, a lack of combination is already present on the level of the attachment to private ownership.