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- Ninotchka
-
-
- (November 6, 1939)
-
- Ninotchka reveals the moral, political and sartorial
- bankruptcy that ensues when a female Bolshevik is exposed to the
- bourgeois perils of running water, Melvyn Douglas and Paris.
- Unlike most pictures about Russian Reds, this one is neither
- crude clowning nor crude prejudice, but a literate and knowingly
- directed satire which lands many a shrewd crack about phony Five
- Year Plans, collective farms. Communist jargon and
- pseudo-scientific gab where it will do the most good -- on the
- funny bone.
-
- Garbo, who plays her first full-length comedy with iron,
- Bolshevik disregard for glamor, in a khaki uniform and middie
- blouse, succeeds in the difficult task of making her
- tight-lipped fanaticism funny without making it ridiculous. Even
- her change of heart is winning and plausible. But why she should
- change under the impact of Melvyn Douglas is one of those things
- even the genius of Karl Marx could not explain.
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-