Daily Dialogue — September 8, 2013
LEON: What kind of a girl are you, anyway?
NINOTCHKA: Just what you see. A tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution.
LEON: You’re the most adorable cog I ever saw in my life. Ninotchka, Cogitska, let me confess something. Never did I dream I could feel like this toward a sergeant.
A clock strikes.
LEON: Do you hear that?
NINOTCHKA: It’s twelve o’clock.
LEON: It’s midnight. One half of Paris is making love to the other half. Look at the clock. One hand has met the
other hand. They kiss. Isn’t that wonderful?
NINOTCHKA: That’s the way a clock works. There’s nothing wonderful about it. You merely feel you must put yourself in a romantic mood to add to your exhilaration.
LEON: I can’t possibly think of a better reason.
NINOTCHKA: It’s false sentimentality.
LEON: (trying desperately to make her mood more romantic) You analyze everything out of existence. You analyze me out of existence. I won’t let you. Love is not so simple. Ninotchka, Ninotchka, why do doves bill and coo? Why do snails, coldest of all creatures, circle interminably around each other? Why do moths fly hundreds of miles to find their mates? Why do flowers open their petals? Oh, Ninotchka, Ninotchka, surely you feel some slight symptom of the divine passion… a general warmth in the palms of your hands… a strange heaviness in your limbs… a burning of the lips that is not thirst but a thousand times more tantalizing, more exalting, than thirst?
He pauses, waiting for the results of his speech.
NINOTCHKA: You are very talkative.
That is too much for Leon. He takes her into his arms and kisses her.
LEON: Was that talkative?
NINOTCHKA: No, that was restful. Again.
Leon kisses her again.
NINOTCHKA: Thank you.
LEON: Oh, my barbaric Ninotchka. My impossible, unromantic, statistical…
Ninotchka pushes him onto his back, kisses him.
LEON: Again.
— Ninotchka (1939), written by Melchior Lengyel, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch
http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=PLZY
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is seduction, suggested by Despina. Today’s suggestion by Traci Nell Peterson.
Trivia: Ernst Lubitsch disliked Gottfried Reinhardt and S.N. Behrman’s original screenplay, so he commissioned a rewrite from Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch. Lubitsch himself made some significant uncredited contributions to the screenplay.
The tagline “Garbo laughs!” came before the screenplay was written; the film was built around that single, now legendary, slogan.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Now that’s a seductive pitch! Although my favorite line in the entire scene is simply the word “Again.” Great laugh line when Ninotchka utters it, then an equally good laugh when Leon calls it back.