Cluny Brown

Lubitsch’s final film (1948’s That Lady in Ermine was released posthumously, completed by Otto Preminger) is an endlessly witty and scathing indictment of British high society, on the eve of World War II. The always delightful Jennifer Jones plays the eponymous plumber’s niece-turned-parlour maid, who meets Charles Boyer’s prominent Czechoslovakian writer at a grand British countryside estate. The irrepressible heroine and the eccentric exile who is hiding from the Nazis form an unlikely alliance, and their burgeoning romance defies the household’s – and the country’s – long-standing social protocols.