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- <text>
- <title>
- (1930s) Ninotchka
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
- Movies
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- Ninotchka
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>(November 6, 1939)
- </p>
- <p> Ninotchka reveals the moral, political and sartorial
- bankruptcy that ensues when a female Bolshevik is exposed to the
- bourgeois perils of running water, Melvyn Douglas and Paris.
- Unlike most pictures about Russian Reds, this one is neither
- crude clowning nor crude prejudice, but a literate and knowingly
- directed satire which lands many a shrewd crack about phony Five
- Year Plans, collective farms. Communist jargon and pseudo-
- scientific gab where it will do the most good--on the funny
- bone.
- </p>
- <p> Garbo, who plays her first full-length comedy with iron,
- Bolshevik disregard for glamor, in a khaki uniform and middie
- blouse, succeeds in the difficult task of making her tight-
- lipped fanaticism funny without making it ridiculous. Even
- her change of heart is winning and plausible. But why she should
- change under the impact of Melvyn Douglas is one of those things
- even the genius of Karl Marx could not explain.</p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-