To mark my birthday, we invited several dozen friends to join us yesterday in watching the 1939 film classic “Ninotchka” starring Greta Garbo. We rented out a local cinema for the occasion. Here is what I said before the film began:
First of all, I’d like to welcome you all to join us in this celebration.
And for taking a risk, coming to see a film that I’ve chosen and have kept secret from all of you.
All you really know is that it won’t be “Team America: World Police” which is why I thought it would be funny to show that. But I was over-ruled.
In a moment, we’ll have the big reveal — I’ll tell you the name of the movie we are about to see.
But first a word of thanks to Cindy, who came up with the idea of renting a cinema and inviting us all to watch one of my favourite films — together.
The movie we will watch tonight is “Ninotchka” — directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring the immortal Greta Garbo.
Now I know that some of you have seen this film already — and some of you have seen it with me.
But I think it’s the kind of film that bears seeing more than once.
Please raise your hands if you have never seen this film.
You are in for a very special treat.
I first saw this movie around 50 years ago. It was part of a double feature of Garbo films that I went to see with some friends in Manhattan. I had never seen any of her films before and had no expectations. This film instantly became one of my very favourite movies, ever.
And I fell in love in the way only a twenty year old could. Because Greta Garbo was simply the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
I want to say a few words about why I chose this film to show to you tonight.
It’s a comedy — one might even call it a rom-com — from Hollywood’s Golden Age, released in 1939, as the Second World War was breaking out.
It was marketed as the first film in which Greta Garbo laughs.
It is a very funny comedy. But it’s more than that.
I think that there are some sophisticated political and social messages in the film.
That’s not suprising as the film’s director and two of the three writers were were anti-fascist refugees from Nazi Germany who had a clear understanding of politics. The writers were Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Bill Wilder. Some of you will know Billy Wilder, who later made “Some Like it Hot” — another masterpiece of comedy.
Let me give an example of the different layers of politics in the film.
If you pay close attention to the first scene when Garbo appears, just before you meet her, you’ll catch a moment when the writers first hint that there is such a thing as “totalitarianism,” and that dictatorial regimes on the left and the right have much more in common than was widely understood at the time.
And despite that fact that the writers and director were all men, there are moments with powerful feminist messages — which you’ll see for the first time when Garbo meets Melvyn Douglas. She insults him in ways that feel relevant to our time as well as hers.
The second half of the film is, I think, not nearly as sharp and focussed as the first part — such were the conventions of the motion picture industry at the time — and yet even here there are wonderful moments.
For example, the role of a Stalinist commissar in Moscow, Ninotchka’s boss Razinin, is given to Bela Lugosi, an actor known to all audiences at the time for playing one particular role, the vampire Dracula. Audiences then — and maybe now — meet this character and instantly understand the he, and regime he serves, represent a unique form of evil.
It should come as no surprise that the film was banned by the Stalinist state.
I’m sure that some of you, like me, will want to look up more information about the film in the Internet Movie Database. There’s lots to view there.
But here’s my favourite fun fact about the movie:
The reviewer of “Ninotchka” for Time magazine — and remember this was the American news magazine, with millions of readers — was a man named Whittaker Chambers. I don’t know how many of you will be familiar with that name. For those who don’t know, Chambers was an American Communist who had served as a Soviet spy until 1938.
When he broke from the Soviets, he revealed that a senior official in the U.S. State Department, Alger Hiss, was also part of the Soviet spy network. Chambers’ accusations against Hiss were a critical moment in the rise of McCarthyism in America and in the Cold War then brewing. They also helped to launch the career of a young Republican politician, Richard Nixon.
And to add one more tiny bit of weirdness to the story, several years before ending his career as a Soviet spy, Chambers made a living as a translator. He famously translated Felix Salten’s book “Bambi” into English. Yes, that “Bambi”.
I haven’t read his review, so I don’t know if he liked “Ninotchka”.
But I hope that you will.