Cluny Brown (1947)

An odd romance; full of odd, satirical elements; set at an odd, transitional time in history.

Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones,) a youthful plumber’s niece gets sent to be a parlor maid in the same country manor a Czechoslovakian professor/refugee/political activist/writer Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer) is invited to say in to keep him safe from Nazi persecution in 1938, pre-War Britain.

His hosts seem to me more concerned, or aware, about his personal safety than he is.

She is a young woman, happily clueless about what is proper and about ‘where she belongs,’ even while living in a culture where maintaining class divisions is not only critical, but where the lower classes seem even more concerned about maintaining those divisions than the upper classes to whom they seem to be invisible.

Being a Czech, our protagonist also doesn’t seem much concerned with respecting British mores and finds the amateur plumber quite refreshing.

On her part she is doing the best she can to please her uncle, her new employees and supervising servants, a suitor (Richard Haydn, whose voice you might recognize as the Disney Caterpillar, and whose character Belinski is all too happy to torture,) and his mother (Una O’Connor who steals every scene she’s in by rudely not speaking a single word, and by loudly and obnoxiously clearing her throat – she even puts out a birthday candle doing this,) and their circle of tut-tutting friends.

He plays Cupid to his young host (with a little help from his host’s mother,) but must also take his own romance life by the reins before a platonic pact between the two leads to inevitable disaster for Cluny and a lonely life for him.

With Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, Reginald Gardiner, Reginald Owen and C. Aubrey Smith.