Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is a working-class girl who doesn't know her place: a plumber's niece, she aspires to plumbing,herself. Sent by Uncle into a more appropriate line of work, as a maid, she finds an iconoclastic ally in anelegant, intellectual scrounger, played by Charles Boyer. James Harvey writes in Romantic Comedy:"(Boyer's) Belinski belongs to a class of movie hero that became briefly popular in the forties, with theimpact both of the war and of film noir. A hero marked by exhaustion, depletion, and bitter knowledge-aonetime man of action and accomplishment gripped and baffled by inaction and despair. It was the figurepreeminently embodied in Bogart's Rick. But in Boyer's version there were suggestions of an almostGarbo-like range and depth: a capacity for implying the world's sorrow as well as his own. Boyer was toplay this figure-the refugee hero with a tragic and partly mysterious past-three times during thedecade...But in the Lubitsch film, this melodramatic hero is placed in a context of comic irony-troubled notby Gestapo agents and obligations to revenge but by penury, sexual and romantic frustration, and thenecessity of maneuvering in the insane world of the British upper classes...It's Boyer's peculiarlyglamorous relation to defeat and disappointment that ties him to Lubitsch and that makes this finaltriumphant collaboration (between them) powerfully moving."