Cluny Brown

A girl with a passion for plumbing is frightfully repugnant to stuffy people who don't even want to admit that they have drains. This wonderfully suggestive idea is the basis of Margery Sharp's wicked satire on English propriety, filmed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1946. Lubitsch cast Jennifer Jones as Cluny (it's her only performance, except for Beat the Devil, that we'd look at twice) and Charles Boyer as the debonair scrounger-two happy iconoclasts who violate the most sacred conventions. He surrounded them with a collection of English class and mass types-the wheezy Richard Hayden, Reginald Owen, Margaret Bannerman, Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Ernest Cossart, Sara Allgood, Florence Bates, Una O'Connor, Reginald Gardiner, C. Aubrey Smith, etc. The comedy is so good–natured and deft that you're not especially conscious of its sophistication until you think it over. If all this isn't sufficient lure, you'd better come just for Richard Hayden and Una O'Connor: they are incredible.

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