Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones) is a working-class British 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 a man without a place, the feckless Czech intellectual Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer). Made just after the war but set just before it, Cluny Brown is both a scathing class satire and a circuitous, self-deflating romance, balancing Jones's determined whimsy with Boyer's melancholy awareness. As James Harvey pointed out in Romantic Comedy, Belinski is a typical 1940s movie hero, “marked by exhaustion, depletion, and bitter knowledge,” but with Lubitschean irony, he is “troubled not by Gestapo agents . . . but by penury, sexual and romantic frustration, and the necessity of maneuvering in the insane world of the British upper classes. . . . It's Boyer's peculiarly glamorous relation to defeat and disappointment that ties him to Lubitsch.”