Cluny Brown likes plumbing — rather, loves plumbing. There’s nothing she’d rather do than break up a clog, get the water moving freely again. This seems to be a metaphor for something, and I think it is. But what?

Cluny Brown (1946) is Ernst Lubitsch’s final movie, and while it’s not often listed among his masterpieces, I think it ought to be. Siri Hustvedt agrees, and focuses on its wry and sly treatment of women’s sexuality:

“The Lubitsch touch” has been defined in many ways, but the phrase hovers over the filmmaker like a halo. It appears to be a quality of visual and verbal grace that cannot be reduced to any particular aspect of production. As far as I can tell, no writer has mentioned that, whatever it means, it summons the tactile sense, what is never present for any moviegoer except by imagination. Lubitsch loved to evoke that missing sensual element by suggestion — especially the play and pleasure of human sexuality. In Cluny Brown, the sex role is taken by plumbing. The orphaned Cluny, a plumber’s niece, is enamored of sinks, drains, pipes (and, by inference only, toilets) when they are clogged beyond use. Her tool of preference for releasing the unwanted pressure is the hammer. “One good bang might turn the trick in a jiffy!” she tells the two startled men who open the door to a lady plumber in the film’s opening scene.

The joke about “banging” comes back later in a fun way. That there’s sexual innuendo here is certainly true: for instance, Cluny’s first line, when a man with a clogged sink opens the door to her knock, expecting of course to see a man, is “Well, shall we have a go at it?” (I guess the censors, being innocent souls, saw nothing objectionable in this.) But I don’t think that’s the main thing — I don’t think that’s what plumbing is really about in Cluny Brown. I think it has less to do with sexual passion than it does with sexual difference, and with social roles. And with war.

Cluny is an innocent, and her innocence has two main aspects. One is that she is unbridled in her enthusiasm for fixing pipes, and she doesn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t do this thing that delights her, especially since it helps people in need. As she says, she likes to roll up her sleeves and pull down her stockings — Do you perceive innuendo in this? Dirty mind! The stockings would be stretched or torn if she kept them in place as she clambered under a sink — and get to work.  And this, her uncle the plumber thinks, is utterly inappropriate for a woman. He is immediately angry when he finds that she has plumbed, and once they get home takes action to set her up as a parlormaid. Work in domestic service, he thinks, will teach her to stay in her place — “your place” is a phrase he uses repeatedly. After all, who polices place more assiduously than the British upper classes? So off Cluny goes to the country house of Sir Henry Carmel and Lady Carmel.

And she works hard to learn her place and to stay in it. She makes many mistakes, and the strict butler wants her dismissed; but the equally strict housekeeper knows how hard it is to get young women to serve in the country and keeps her on, though constantly reminding her that she is failing to keep her place. But Cluny keeps trying.

But she develops a bit of a social life as well. When the local chemist, the priggish Mr. Wilson (played with cringeworthy brilliance by Robert Haydn, above), condescends to court Cluny, he does so with the evident sense that he is honoring her and elevating her — after all, she is a mere parlormaid, while he is a shop-owner, a respected member of the community. For this reason it never occurs to him to ask why this rather attractive young woman would be attracted to him. Nor does it occur to Cluny to see the matter in any other light than that in which Mr. Wilson sees things.

This is the second dimension of Cluny’s innocence.

On the evening when Mr. Wilson invites friends over to his home to celebrate his mother’s birthday — and to announce his engagement to Cluny — there comes a terrible gurgling from the pipes in his water closet. Cluny tries to restrain herself, but cannot: she grabs a wrench and a hammer and addresses the problem, accompanied by one of the guests, a small boy who thinks she’s amazing. But Mr. Wilson doesn’t think she’s amazing. Appalled by her action, he moves with great dignity across the room and silently closes the door to prevent his guests from observing the shameful goings-on.

After fixing the pipes, Cluny emerges triumphant, only to be dismayed when the guests all depart, Mr. Wilson’s mother goes to her room, and Mr. Wilson turns on Cluny with anger and contempt, demanding that she make herself “presentable” before he speaks to her any further. This is Jennifer Jones’s best moment in the movie: As she rolls down her sleeves and adjusts her hair, tears come to her eyes. Delight has given way to confusion, and now confusion gives way to shame. Once again, she has forgotten her place. And later in the movie we discover that she completely endorses Mr. Wilson’s condemnation of her and only wishes to regain his favor.

There’s an immensely touching moment in Mansfield Park when Fanny Price is, to everyone’s surprise, invited to dinner, and her hateful aunt, Mrs. Norris, assumes that it would be impossible for a mere dependent like Fanny to have access to the family’s carriage. “Her niece thought it perfectly reasonable. She rated her own claims to comfort as low even as Mrs. Norris could.” That is, Fanny has learned better than anyone the lessons of her inferiority: she is not one who has any legitimate “claims” to make upon anyone. This is also how Cluny thinks, or rather feels: that she doesn’t deserve better treatment than she gets. And that to have a place is worth almost any price.

This is where Professor Belinski comes into the story I am telling: Charles Boyer, a French actor playing a Czech refugee with a Polish name. (In the book on which the movie is based he is Polish, but I think Lubitsch assumed that audiences would associate Poland with 1939 and Czechoslovakia with 1938.) Belinski has been in the movie all along, from the first scene. He a Czech without a country, “one of Hitler’s worst enemies,” a professor without a university, without a job, without a home — he has his mail sent to General Delivery because he has nowhere else to send it. He is a displaced person, a term that was coined during the Second World War. And here we should be reminded that while Cluny Brown appeared in 1946, it is set in 1938, and we are told explicitly at the outset, as we contemplate the view across the Thames from the South Bank to Big Ben, that in 1938 nobody in England had anything to worry about — or anyway nothing more important than a plumbing problem in advance of a cocktail party.

Sir Henry Carmel’s son Andrew describes Belinski to him:

Andrew: He’s fighting for a new and better world.

Sir Henry: What for?

Andrew: What for? Haven’t you heard of the Nazis?

Sir Henry: Oh yes, German chaps. Always wanted to see one. Send him down, by all means.

Andrew: Father, he isn’t a Nazi. He’s fighting the Nazis. He’s a Czech. The Nazis are after him.

Sir Henry has heard of Hitler and knows that he’s written a book called My Camp: “Sort of an outdoor book, isn’t it?” (Belinski agrees that, yes, in a way it is an “outdoor book.”) But beyond that he doesn’t understand what’s happening, and what’s coming. He and Lady Carmel are sweet people — thoughtful, kind, generous, forbearing — but they have inherited a world in which everyone knows their place, and they understand their duty to be the preservation of that world. They simply cannot grasp that the world that seems to them permanent and unchallengeable will soon collapse and that war, total war, will make it collapse. They are anything but hanging judges, but in one respect they’re reminiscent of something George Orwell wrote in 1941:

The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

The day is not far off when the Carmels just might need a plumber and all the plumbers are off fighting Nazis. And what will they do then? Then, maybe, when someone talks about fighting for a better world they won’t ask “What for?”

And now maybe we begin to see why this silly movie about a woman with a passion for plumbing has so much in it about the coming of the Second World War, why Hitler keeps popping up in it. It’s less about the policing of women’s sexuality than about why Labour crushed the Tories in the 1945 General Election.

Right from the beginning of the movie, Belinski understands Cluny’s predicament, and before all her big problems start, he tells her: “Nobody can tell you where your place is. Where is my place? Where is everybody’s place? I’ll tell you where it is. Wherever you’re happy — that’s your place.” How those words of wisdom work themselves out, for him and for Cluny, I leave for you to discover when you watch this curious and wonderful movie.

P.S. There is one moment of absolutely blatant sexual innuendo in Cluny Brown that the censors missed — perhaps because of Charles Boyer’s accent? I can’t even imagine. It doesn’t involve Cluny, though. What happens is this: Belinski enters the room of another guest at Carmel Manor, the Honorable Betty Cream (Helen Walker), to plead with her to be more kind to the young man who loves her. Or is that really why he’s there? Betty Cream, lying in bed in her nightgown as she reads a book, has her doubts. The Professor denies any interest in her. He says, altogether unconvincingly, “Miss Cream, you hold no attraction for me whatever. None. That creamy complexion … those blue eyes … those rounded shoulders … those … Well, I assure you, all this means very little to me.” As he speaks his eyes pass from her face and eyes to her shoulders and then when he says simply “those” he’s looking right at her breasts.