The Case of the Cluny Browns

I have just finished reading Margery Sharp’s 1946 novel Cluny Brown, which is a remarkably enjoyable comedy of manners somewhat in an Evelyn Waugh/Angela Thirkell mold. I’m not sure if it’s actually a good book or not; as I read, it was filtered through the 1946 movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Jennifer Jones and Charles Boyer, and that confuses the issue. Trifling details aside (Jones is decidedly not plain-looking, and Boyer is fifteen years too old), the film has a more satisfying narrative arc, with the plot twist that takes up the last twenty pages of the book given better preliminary spadework; it also includes some deftly-orchestrated bits of social satire that are missing from the book, but which ring entirely true to their time and place — so far as this twenty-first-century American can tell, anyway. Much of the best dialogue, however, is repeated verbatim, especially the delicious bedroom talk between Lady Carmel and Betty Cream. (I know, what names. It’s that kind of book.)

I would recommend Cluny Brown the book to anyone who likes Jane Austen for reasons other than the period dress, and I would recommend Cluny Brown the movie to anyone who likes Ealing comedies. The book is of course long out of print, though my copy was easy enough to find, and the movie is not out on DVD; I downloaded my copy, which has French subtitles. I look forward to reading the book again, when the movie doesn’t press so insistent on my consciousness, and then seeing the movie again in light of the book, which is the natural order of things.

Speaking of Ernst Lubitsch, it’s something of a pity that his name isn’t better known; in the 30s and 40s it was a name to conjure with in Hollywood, but the auteurist critics of the 50s and 60s and their descendents tend to ignore him, perhaps thinking that he’d already had enough attention paid him. Five of his best movies are available on DVD now, and I’d say that no film education is complete without any (preferably all) of them: Trouble in Paradise, Ninochtka, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not To Be, and Heaven Can Wait. The movie Cluny Brown may ultimately be a second-tier work, but that first tier is as good as movies get.

Oh, the title. Cluny Brown is the heroine of both stories, a plumber’s niece who, if the movie had been made ten years later, would have been played by Audrey Hepburn with greater distinction but less sex. She’s not so adorable on the page; but the rest of the cast is better served in the book.