“Cluny Brown”

November 2019

“Squirrels to the Nuts” — Cluny Brown Arrives on Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 997
Format: Blu-ray

Overall Enjoyment

Picture Quality

Sound Quality

Extras

A skewering of the British class system, and a paean to the joys of finding one’s place in life, Margery Sharp’s best-selling novel from 1944 seemed to cry out for a movie version, and in 1946 it got The Lubitsch Touch — it was Ernst Lubitsch’s final completed film. Book and film are set in 1938 London, at the time of Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland. Although Sharp, writing at the height of WWII, obviously knew of the later consequences of this action, here Hitler is something of a joke, and the invasion an only potentially horrible event that takes second place to her main characters’ preservation of social decorum.