Word: ninotchka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...back on the screen-thanks to the Thomas Committee's anti-Communist inquiry. At the hearings M-G-M had been criticized for making Song of Russia (1944), a wartime boost for America's Red ally. MGM's comeback was a reissue of Garbo in Ninotchka (1939), a picture that kids the pants off Bolshevik commissars. As soon as prints are ready, Ninotchka will be re-released in most of the nation's larger cities...
Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, a fun-loving, hard-working Hollywood writing-directing team (Ninotchka, The Lost Weekend), came home from Europe conscious of one big difference between U.S. and European movies. To the New York Post's Archer Winsten they explained...
...Ernst Lubitsch a good movie director and producer? One of the best: "Ninotchka" and "Heaven Can Wait" are typical products of the "Lubitsch touch." And is Jennifer Jones a good actress? Yes, and as beautiful as her co-star, Charles Boyer. This fellow Samuel Hoffenstein, can he write? Like a Parker 51. Then how come "Cluny Brown" is such a bum picture...
...testify to this. The latest example of Hollywood's attitude to the war is seen in "To Be Or Not To Be," Ernst Lubitsch's new farce, a very comic idea made acutely uncomfortable because the locale of the picture is Warsaw during the German occupation of Poland. In "Ninotchka" Lubitsch ribbed the foibles of the Russians and their Five Year Plan with great humor and relish. But the same formula is not successful in the present picture, for there is something too agonizingly real about the military genius of the Germans in the past three years to make them...
Bits of the picture are hilarious, deft touches that could come only from Lubitsch's direction. But they often slip over into the intensely dramatic and prevent the consistency of tone present in such Lubitsch successes as "Ninotchka." For instance, take this case: a Gestapo agent, speaking of Jack Benny's acting, says, "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." The basic plot is a natural for Benny and Miss Lombard, who are cast as Josef and Maria Tura, the leading actor and actress of Poland. He is an actor who revels in Hamlet...