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Cluny Brown

Screening on Film
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
With Jennifer Jones, Charles Boyer, Peter Lawford.
US, 1946, 35mm, black & white, 100 min.
Print source: Criterion

Lubitsch’s adaptation of Margery Sharp's mischievous satire on English propriety is one of his most engaging romantic comedies. Conforming to societal expectations, the orphaned Cluny Brown—played by a stunning, radiant Jennifer Jones—lands a job as a maid at a country estate and finds herself trapped in the tortuous manners of British high society. Luckily, she finds an ally in Charles Boyer’s elegant Czech intellectual Adam Belinski. Crossing class and gender expectations, the displaced duo frustrates convention—while navigating the complex plumbing of old estates and bewildered hearts. Set before the war but shaded with the darker tones of a humor postwar, Cluny Brown was Lubitsch’s last completed film before his untimely death a year later at the age of fifty-five. 

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