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.