There is a Hollywood movie that combines both the stereotypes of humorless feminists and socialists -- a "romantic comedy" about a feminist socialist woman from Soviet Russia, played by Greta Garbo, who gets seduced by irresistibly attractive capitalist ways in Paris, the seduction of shopping paralleling a process of humanization, learning to laugh, with a not so subtle implication that Soviet socialism is the opposite of humanity:
How are things in Moscow? Ninotchka replies (before she learns to shop and laugh): "Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians!"
_Ninotchka_ (1939), directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with the script co-authored by Billy Wilder, <http://www.lubitsch.com/ninotchka.html>.
The tagline then was "Garbo Laughs!" See the movie posters at <http://www.lubitsch.com/images/ninot1.gif> and <http://www.filmforum.com/comedyfilms/images/ninotchka.jpg> and a movie still at <http://www.filmforum.com/films/lubitsch/ninotchka.jpg>.
Here's a punchline:
"Hungarian dramatist Melchior Lengyel was asked to come up with an idea and he produced three sentences for which MGM paid him $15,000: 'Russian woman saturated with Bolshevist ideas goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad, after all'" (at <http://alt.tcm.turner.com/essentials/2002/big_nino.html>).
Neither Lubitsch (e.g., _Trouble in Paradise_), Wilder (e.g., _Double Indemnity_, _The Apartment_), nor Garbo (her close friend Salka Viertel, with whom she wished [but didn't get] to make "a screen biography of Madame Curie," became a victim of the black list -- <http://alt.tcm.turner.com/essentials/2002/big_nino.html> and <http://www.smmirror.com/volume3/issue52/everyone_went_to.asp>), however, was a great fan of American capitalism and gender and sexual norms that went with it.
In any case, if you look like Greta Garbo, does it matter if you have a sense of humor? ;-> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>
