Although comic types metamorphosed into the sophisticated, low-life, anarchistic, sentimental, folksy, screwball, populist, or romantic, the production.

Although comic types metamorphosed into the sophisticated, low-life, anarchistic, sentimental, folksy, screwball, populist, or romantic, the production trend remained a key component of every studio’s roster. (Balio, GD 256)

Steve Vineberg, High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present (2005)

THIS PICTURE TAKES PLACE IN PARIS IN THOSE WONDERFUL DAYS WHEN A SIREN WAS A BRUNETTE AND NOT AN ALARM..AND IF A FRENCHMAN TURNED OUT THE LIGHT IT WAS NOT ON ACCOUNT OF AN AIR RAID!

Ninotchka’s opening title (added between end of shooting [27 July 1939] and premiere [6 October 1939])

But what is particularly misleading about the title is that it suggests a more perfect past, a past free from all tensions and single-mindedly devoted to the clichéd French pursuit of love. The near paradise the title portrays is especially out of keeping with the drama’s whole host of oppositions that promise no easy resolution:

capitalist / communist selfish / selflessaristocrat / peasantidler / workerromance / biologyirony / directnessprivate / publicfrivolous / seriousfun / work

…one of the most striking aspects of this film as a product of popular American culture is how many positive attributes in this dialectical list gravitate to the communist pole, while the capitalist side has more than its fair share of negative qualities.

William Paul, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy (Columbia U.P., 1983), 206

Joan Crawford, by Eve Arnold, 1959

Garbo on the screen

Garbo “at work”

Garbo “at home”

Garbo in public

Stars articulate what it is to be a human being in contemporary society; that is, they express the particular notion we hold of the person, of the “individual.”They do so complexly, variously—they are not straightforward affirmations of individualism. On the contrary, they articulate both the promise and the difficulty that the notion of individuality presents for all of us who live by it…

At its most optimistic, the social world is seen in the conception to emanate from the individual, and each person is seen to “make” his or her own life. However, this is not necessary to the concept. What is central is the idea of the separable, coherent quality, located “inside” in consciousness and variously termed “the self,” “the soul,” “the subject,” and so on. This is counterposed to “society,” something seen as logically distinct from the individuals who compose it, and very often as inimical to them. If in ideas of “triumphant individualism” individuals are seen to determine society, in ideas of “alienation” individuals are seen as cut adrift from and dominated, battered by the anonymity of society. Both views retain the notion of the individual as separate, irreducible, unique.

Dyer, from Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Introduction

What is at stake…is the degree to which, and manner in which, what the star really is can be located in some inner, private, essential core. This is how the star phenomenon reproduces the overriding ideology of the person in contemporary society. But the star phenomenon cannot help being also about the person in public. Stars, after all, are always inescapably people in public…The private/public, individual/society dichotomy can be embodied by stars in various ways; the emphasis can fall at either end of the spectrum, although it usually falls at the private, authentic, sincere end. Mostly too there is a sense of “really” in play—people/stars are really themselves in private or perhaps in public but at any rate somewhere. However, it is one of the ironies of the whole star phenomenon that all these assertions of the reality of the inner self or of public life take place in one of the aspects of modern life that is most associated with the invasion and destruction of the inner self and corruptibility of public life, namely the mass media.

Dyer, from Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Introduction

So many times over the years since my “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” article was published in Screen, I have been asked why I only used the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator. At the time, I was interested in the relationship between the image of woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live moviegoer. In-built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as “point of view”; a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of a masculine third person. However, the persistent question “what about the women in the audience?” and my own love of Hollywood melodrama (equally shelved as an issue in “Visual Pleasure”) combined to convince me that, however ironically it had been intended originally, the male third person closed off avenues of inquiry that should be followed up.

Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” 1981