NINOTCHKA (1939) *** "Comrades, I'm out of the omelette." Felix Bressart is one of the great presences of all time. You just automatically like the guy the minute he shows his moustachioed face, you trust him, and you know that he can be moved around for the right reasons. Of course then there's the leading actress: Greta Garbo could have had a career of nothing but high comedy if she'd wanted, could have invented new careers and arts-did that, come to think of it; could have been an icy doctrinaire zealot to scare the pants off of anyone, or an oversmoked temptress to charm them the same direction. Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch provide the opening 40 minutes or so with snappy lines to hold up against anything for blinding clarity, and the final scenes regain nearly the same standard. In between Ernst Lubitsch invokes his magic schmaltz in milkshake grade density, which isn't bad but I was delighted when Bela Lugosi appears to (no really, I swear) break that spell and send the entire thing spinning off into Constantinople with talk of magic carpets, borscht and too much champagne. The remaining cast waxes between being supporting and brilliant when given the shot: co-star Melvyn Douglas (suavely pulling off lines both great and cliche' with a common slickness and nearly inspiring pre-installed charm) and co-supporting comrade Alexander Granach stand out (especially in the three comrades and a party in the royal suite scene). At its heart this comedy is a straightforward compare and contrast of Stalinist communism and old world Euro-capitalism. How much either have changed is open to interpretation, but if this was an early salvo in the Cold War it's no wonder that the commies were behind early and, deservedly, trying to play catch-up. "The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians." Sadly, the same way that it's still done in both Russia and the USA, we've just progressed to the point that we add "on the street" at the end.
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