Film Forum

(1939) “GARBO LAUGHS!” Bolshevik “special envoy” Greta Garbo keeps bumbling Paris emissaries Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski sweating borscht – until she discovers the joie du chapeau with Count Melvyn Douglas. Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. 35mm. Approx. 110 min.

Reviews

“Exquisitely done, so much so that even communists might enjoy this parody of their sensibilities.” 
– Eric Monder, Film Journal

“GLORIOUS! Ninotchka is delicate flirtation and political satire made into a perfect whole, and a reminder of skills that studio writers have largely lost. In their moment, the film’s Stalin jokes got bigger yuks than they do now, but sublimely, the sense of romantic dislocation has lost none of its swirl or heat.” 
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

“Ample comic references to executions, forced confessions, Siberian prisons, censorship, and the secret police are matched by a sharp scene evoking the corrupt and bloodthirsty arrogance of the czarist aristocracy that the Revolution overthrew—as well as two jolting, pointed “Heil, Hitler” jokes that spotlight another menace.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Has the nonchalance and the sophistication that were Lubitsch’s trademarks.”
– Pauline Kael

“Stalin won’t like it.”
– The New York Times