GARBO LAUGHS!

Greta Garbo was not known for being funny. Could she be cast in a comedy? When MGM started looking for something in the late 1930s that might fit her style, writer Melchior Lengyel knew just what might work. His proposal: let a Russian girl with Bolshevist ideas fall in love in Paris and she’ll learn the beauty of capitalism. MGM agreed to do that story and the film became Garbo’s last great success.

It helped that Ernst Lubitsch was hired as director; he was someone Garbo admired and he knew how to give this film his famous touch.

On a mission to sell jewellery
Three Soviet agents (Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach) arrive in Paris and book a room in one of the city’s fanciest hotels. They intend to sell jewellery confiscated during the Russian Revolution, but their mission is soon exposed. The former Russian Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire) enlists the help of an aristocratic liaison in Paris, Count Léon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), whom she’s hoping might be able to retrieve the jewellery that was stolen from her. The count manipulates the three agents, but Moscow is angered and sends another agent who is a much tougher challenge – ”Ninotchka” Yakushova (Garbo), a grim, methodical woman. Initially, d’Algout is amused, but it doesn’t take him long to fall for her…

Wry observations on life in Russia
MGM found the right people to turn Lengyel’s story into dynamite. This was the first truly successful collaboration between Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, who co-wrote the script together with Walter Reisch. The film is packed with hilariously memorable lines and wry observations on life in Russia, making fun of rigid communism.

It’s interesting to note how European the people behind the camera were, with Reisch and Wilder originating from Austria, Lubitsch from Germany and Lengyel from Hungary. The film’s perspective is firmly in favor of good old American capitalism, but it’s as if we can sense a European touch and insight into what it’s like to experience autocratic regimes. Ninotchka becomes a perfect symbol of Soviet authoritarianism, unaware of how comically dark her obedient political mantras become. Garbo shines in her role as the extremely technocratic communist who eventually learns how to laugh and becomes infatuated with an aristocrat. Allegedly, she felt insecure about playing this part, especially the scenes where champagne has made Ninotchka tipsy, but she comes across as confident and delivers her sharp lines with excellent timing. It’s a fascinating send-up of and contrast to the sober persona she spent the 1930s developing on screen; the tagline ”Garbo laughs!” was a play on ”Garbo talks!”, the famous ad campaign used for her talkie debut in Anna Christie (1930).

Douglas (who co-starred with Garbo in As You Desire Me (1932)) is charming as the playful but smug count who learns the hard way that there’s only one way to get Ninotchka to laugh. The film gets a lively shot in the arm from Ruman, Bressart and Granach as the three Soviet agents who are not terribly good at what they do.

Ninotchka premiered just as the world was thrown into its worst war yet. The Soviet Union did not appreciate its sense of humor, banning the movie throughout the territories it dominated. No wonder, this was a rare outright attack on the nightmarish society that Joseph Stalin had built. Still, the film was a global hit and one of the finest examples of Lubitsch’s refined touch, a sharp comedy of manners set in upper-class environs and a lovely pre-war Paris. As the movie premiered after the outbreak of World War II, it must have looked instantly nostalgic.

Ninotchka 1939-U.S. 110 min. B/W. Produced by Ernst Lubitsch, Sidney Franklin. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch. Story: Melchior Lengyel. Cast: Greta Garbo (Nina Ivanovna ”Ninotchka” Yakushova), Melvyn Douglas (Léon d’Algout), Ina Claire (Grand Duchess Swana), Bela Lugosi, Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart.

Trivia: Later turned into a Broadway musical, ”Silk Stockings”, which also became a movie in 1957. 

Quote: “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.” (Garbo)

Last word: “We were previewing ‘Ninotchka’, and Lubitsch took the writers along, too, in Long Beach. And they are outside in the lobby there, a stack of cards, with the audience invited to put down their thoughts. So the picture starts playing, and it plays very well. Now Lubitsch takes the cards, a heap of the cards, doesn’t let anybody else touch them. We get into the big MGM limousine. We turn the lights up. Now, so, he takes the preview cards and he starts reading. ‘Very good’… ‘brilliant’… Twenty cards. But when he comes to the 21st card, he starts laughing as hard as I ever saw him laugh, and we say, ‘What is it?’ He keeps the cards to himself, he does not let anybody even look. Then, finally, he calms down a little and starts reading. And what he read was – I have the card– ‘Funniest picture I ever saw. So funny that I peed in my girlfriend’s hand.’” (Wilder, Vanity Fair)

IMDb