Ninotchka develops from cynicism into about as warm a Cold War film as ever there was. Ninotchka (Greta Garbo), the severe and dedicated Russian commissar, is sent to check up on the activities of three dubious emissaries feeling their oats in Paris. But romance threatens to melt the ice and foil the mission when the head of our bluenose Red is turned by the good looks of dashing capitalist Melvyn Douglas. "'Garbo laughs!' said the ads for Ninotchka....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....There is a story about Garbo that she once seriously expressed a wish to play St. Francis of Assisi. In some ways she comes as near to that unconventional aim as she could do in Ninotchka, whose heroine-puritan and visionary, humanitarian and ideologic-has some of the qualities we associate with the Christian saint....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." (James Harvey, Romantic Comedy)