Word: ninotchkas
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...Communist for the FBI (Warner) bucks a longtime box-office jinx. Except for 1939's deft Ninotchka, which turned laughter loose on Communism, none of Hollywood's anti-Communist movies (e.g., The Red Menace, The Iron Curtain, The Red Danube) has fared well with the customers. The Warner Brothers, who landed in the black with 1939's Confessions of a Nazi Spy, now try to turn the same trick against the Reds...
...Vienna, Ninotchka, Ernst Lubitsch's sprightly 1939 spoof of Communists and the U.S.S.R., could no longer be seen. The movie had packed two of the city's theaters for weeks. But when the Russians took their turn at policing Vienna's international district, they "suggested" that it was time to change the bill...
There can be no denying the conviction of the film. The actors are uniformly excellent and restrained; the direction is good, except for its unintentional lapses into 'Ninotchka' mockery, revealing the risible elements of any dogma-swallowing people; the photography is just right. I found myself frequently on the edge of my seat with stomach tingling, like it used to do when, as a kid, I saw the 'Dracula' films...
Crowds thronged to see a film on the Pope's anti-war activities. Many were attracted by the title: War Against War. Other crowds saw Garbo's Ninotchka, newly released in Italy; it gave them a chance to laugh, briefly, at Communism. In Naples, the minstrels were singing...
Died. Ernst Lubitsch, 55, roguish ("Puck with a cigar") movie producer-director who got his famed "Lubitsch touch" from the late wunderbare Producer-Director Max Reinhardt and left it on a score of sophisticated implausibilities (Monte Carlo, Ninotchka, Cluny Brown); of a heart ailment; in Bel-Air, Calif. Lubitsch, whose German-made Gypsy Blood and Passion brought Emil Jannings, Pola Negri and a grace-note style of cinema comedy to the U.S. in 1919, was one of the first European directors to earn-and keep-Hollywood's cash-&-carry respect...