Rent Cluny Brown (1946)

My Favourite Lubitsch. - Cluny Brown review by Steve

With the fighting now over, Ernst Lubitsch revisits prewar England for this class satire, made in Hollywood. Charles Boyer is a Czech dissident wanted by the Nazis, who finds himself at a country house where everyone, above and below stairs knows their place. He is an unconventional, insouciant free spirit, which makes him incongruous in this sleepy backwater.

So he forms a bond with a vivacious lady's maid/plumbers daughter (Jennifer Jones) who also struggles to accept the straitjacket of tradition. England before WWII is satirised and made to look absurd, whereas the interlopers are lively and iconoclastic.  The servant often wields a hammer.

 This was made in 1946, when the old world order was being questioned, by men coming back from combat and the women who sustained the home front. The film implies that society and the feudal restrictions of class have to change. It damages and trivialises everyone, either side of the divide.

Boyer and Jones are marvellous, and there's the usual excellent support of Hollywood Brits in character roles, notably, Una O'Conner as a grotesque old busybody who communicates entirely by coughing. There's some really funny dialogue too. It's the last film Lubitsch completed. He signs off with a clever, funny classic.

Lubitsch in Britain - Cluny Brown review by AG

Late Lubitsch, but still on top comic form. The eponymous Cluny (Jennifer Jones) steals this film with a wonderfully quirky character. Lubitsch sends up the British class system with outsiders revealing its absurdity. 

Perfection - Cluny Brown review by CH

Author of many novels, some of which became plays and films, Margery Sharp is most associated with one which became animated: The Rescuers. Too little known now, and decidedly animated in the general sense of the word, is Cluny Brown. This became Lubritch's last film. Made in 1946, and set eight years earlier, it is a satire upon the English upper classes' hidebound notions, with an emphasis upon their deploring Jennifer Jones in the eponymous role as a womam for whom pleasure offers nothing greater than taking a spanner to a pipe and unblocking the laden sink above.

She finds herself as a maid in a country house where Charles Boyer (whom she has previously encountered) has been offered sanctuary from German persecution. They are kindred spirits, and make this the most unusual of romantic comedies, one encapsulated in the phrase "nuts to the squirrels!" - or should that be "squirrels to the nuts!"? Either way, this is one of the many details, such as a well-bred welcoming pot of tea and crumpet, which sound preposterous in summary but prove to have a logic as comic and affecting as the entire film.

Be sure not to miss it.