"Garbo laughs!' said the ads for Ninotchka . . . an event on a par with “Garbo talks!,” the 1930 slogan that heralded her talkie debut in Anna Christie. Garbo-the paradigm for all stars in her beauty and mystery and final inaccessibility-was now a screwball heroine, too. And the mystery compounded: she was funny . . . One of the elements of the Garbo mystique was always the degree to which she could make idealism seem as much a felt human need as love or food. So that in Ninotchka she can speak of getting “foreign currency to buy tractors” (Lubitsch gives her a full glowing close-up) and be powerfully moving as she does so. Garbo, Lubitsch, and the screwball comedy come together in this film in a most astonishing result: the closest thing to a convincing socialist heroine the English-speaking cinema has yet produced. It's a nice payoff to the screwball tradition: that it had the freedom to offer even this surprise.