Very good film. interesting plot.
For years I had searched for this movie in the vain hope of ever finding it. Till last night I found it on Youtube.
Lubitsch's evolution as a director is the most delightful and surprising of Hollywood's old Guard giants. In a sense, he arrived on the scene from Germany ready-made; with little visual skill but a prodigious talent for gags which were transparently clever and loaded with innuendo but too rigorously rehearsed to be as funny as their reputation suggests.
Maybe some day movie execs will realize that Americans can and do appreciate dry humor and witty dialog. That we do appreciate movies that deal with eccentric individualists rising above class inequities.
Modest but enjoyable comedy which doesn't suffer too much from showing little of it's director's famed 'touch.' Jones is surprisingly good, as is Bowyer, but it's character actor Richard Haydn as Cluny's stuffy beau and Una O'Connor as his perpetually throat-clearing mother who steal the picture.
This was the last film completed by Ernst Lubitsch - he began shooting That Lady In Ermine but died halfway through and it was completed by Otto Preminger - and though not quite up there with the likes of Ninotchka and The Shop Around The Corner it remains a fine movie. I've always had a problem with Jennifer Jones and it's basically the same problem I have with Gloria Grahame, overblown, faux sultriness and the impression that their underwear is soiled; strangely enough both of them were able to manage comedy, Graham in Oklahoma and Jones here.
Ernest Lubitsch used the charms and abilities of his leads Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones to get some maximum performances out of them and make his next to last film Cluny Brown a great success. I've not heard that Lubitsch had to contend with Jennifer's husband and Svengali David O.
Cluny Brown (1946)"It's never too late for a cat." And this is the essence of the movie, a supposed satire on British manners pre-WWII, but more likely just a bit of delightful nonsense.
'Cluny Brown' had a good deal going for it. The big draw is the cast, it is hard to resist a cast that includes Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, Helen Walker, Reginald Owen, Una O'Connor and Richard Haydn.
