Ninotchka  (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) 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. During one of those shortages of cash that seem to be chronic in the planned economy, Moscow sends Comrades Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski to Paris to sell confiscated jewels. Though at first they ask, "What would Comrade Lenin say?" about stopping at a swank hotel, the answer soon comes clear: "Comrade Lenin would say, 'The prestige of the workers must be upheld.' We cannot go against Comrade Lenin." But they hastily order "the smallest, dirtiest room in the hotel" when Moscow sends Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) to check up. She is an unsmiling Young Russian, with a delightful Swedish accent, who announces that love is a chemical reaction, wants to know at once how much steel the Eiffel Tower contains. At Count Leon's (Melvyn Douglas) smart bachelor apartment, Ninotchka shocks his staid old butler by asking, "Does he beat you?" and by urging that all wealth be shared equally. As the butler indignantly refuses to share his lifetime savings with his bankrupt employer, she says: "Run along to bed, little father."

When the Count makes love [flirts: Otto] to her while a traffic cop is tooting his whistle, grimly scientific Ninotchka asks: "What is the interval between his whistles?" Her disintegration begins when she discards her semi-military outfit, buys the most becoming hat she can find, which looks like a horse's nose bag inverted.

Though the comedy becomes somewhat chilled when the comrades return to Moscow, there are such inspirations as a parade on the Red Square with marchers solidly carrying hundreds of identical pictures of Stalin. There are scenes in Ninotchka's small apartment whose limited lebensraum she shares with a girl cellist, a beefy Russian streetcar conductress of the kind Poet e. e. cummings called "non-men," and a dark, dumpy little man who plods silently in and out—"You never know whether he is going to the washroom or the secret police."

Garbo, who plays her first full-length comedy with iron, Bolshevik disregard for glamour, 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.

Good gag: When Ninotchka asks, "Aren't you in love with our Five Year Plan?", cracks Melvyn Douglas: "I've been in love with that Five Year Plan for the last 15 years."