Ernst Lubitsch - 1946
This is one of my favourite Lubitsch films, along with 'The Shop Around The Corner'. Both have a wonderful, true air of quiet desperation and melancholy. Charles Boyer's performance in this is one of the most magnificent I have seen in the classical Hollyowood cinema. Lubitsch's repetition of a line or action, from humour to melancholy, mixed together always, is perfectyed with the opening of the shop door here.
The themes of class, place, freedom, are foregrounded more that in other Lubitsch work. When Cluny mistaken by the Lord and Lady, one of the most perfect, quiet evocations of tyranny is shown.
All right, it ends with a man pulling up a female prole, but gosh, there is a lot of truth here.
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