Apart from the direct Cluny Brown quotation, there's more that links these two. It's perhaps no coincidence that Melvyn Douglas' daughter Illeana appears in the later film, and it's also interesting that both directors started out as actors, and both liked to act out scenes for their casts. When asked about which era Peter would have liked to have lived in, he replied 'the thirties. I'd want to be a film-maker under contract at Paramount as Lubitsch was head of the studio'. Lubitsch was the one great director not in 'Who the Devil Made It?' because he was already dead.
Ninotchka isn't my favourite Lubitsch but it is a highly polished and enjoyable MGM picture, with Garbo laughing and falling in love, and that unbeatable trio of Felix Bressart, Sig Ruman and Alexander Granach in a screenplay by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reich. There are plenty of jokes and nice little observations, such as the Paris swallow that picks up a crumb of Moscow black bread and discards it. Ina Claire is Douglas's other love interest, Bela Lugosi has only one scene, thankfully; Richard Carle is the 'little father' butler. Like many of Garbo's pictures it's shot by William Daniels.
She's Funny That Way is in many ways the perfect Bogdanovich swan-song. It's about actors and the theatre, where Peter came in, while doing the big film reference bit (not just Lubitsch but Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast at Tiffany's - one of Peter's 'Movie of the Week' choices, too). And Imogen Poots is a really wonderful lead ("Say, could you kiss me again, before the thirty grand"), and the other girls Jennifer Aniston and Kathryn Hahn and Debbie Mazur are wonderful too.
It's cool also in that several important people in Peter's career also appear - Cybill Shepherd, Austin Pendleton, George Morfogen, Tatum O'Neal and even Colleen Camp (missed her), whilst the newcomers are all fine - Owen Wilson, Rhys Ifans, Will Forte and Tarantino in a hilarious cameo.
Also has a nice line in film myth vs. reality, and 'don't let the facts get in the way of a great story'. It was co-written by Louise Stratten. I guess it wasn't a success because people don't 'get' an essentially old-fashioned film like this any more.
Peter liked Wilson and Aniston together in Marley and Me and offered her the part of the wife. She wisely recognised that the psychiatrist was the better role. He also liked that Wilson frequently ad-libbed lines, such as the argument in the taxi.
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