"'Garbo laughs!' said the ads forNinotchka...an event on a par with 'Garbo talks!,' the 1930 slogan that heralded her talkie debut in AnnaChristie. Garbo-the paradigm for all stars in her beauty and mystery and final inaccessibility-was now ascrewball heroine, too. And the mystery compounded: she was funny...There is a story about Garbo that sheonce seriously expressed a wish to play St. Francis of Assisi. In some ways she comes as near to thatunconventional aim as she could do in Ninotchka. Whose heroine-puritan and visionary, humanitarian andideologic-has some of the qualities we associate with the Christian saint. The St. Francis story is usuallyoffered as evidence of Garbo's eccentricity. But in fact it makes sense. One of the elements of the Garbomystique was always the degree to which she could make idealism seem as much a felt human need as loveor food. So that in Ninotchka she can speak of getting 'foreign currency to buy tractors' (Lubitsch gives hera full glowing close-up) and be powerfully moving as she does so. Garbo, Lubitsch, and the screwballcomedy come together in this film in a most astonishing result: the closest thing to a convincing socialistheroine the English-speaking cinema has yet produced. It's a nice payoff to the screwball tradition: that ithad the freedom to offer even this surprise." James Harvey, Romantic Comedy