The film, shot between December 1945 and early February 1946, has a theme, which sounds as loudly as honking, belching pipes: human freedom. This postwar film is mostly kind to the sleepwalking dolts who know their place—high, middle, or low—and fail to recognize looming catastrophe. But the film also explicitly treats the humiliations visited upon a woman who dares to tread beyond the rigid boundaries of her class and sex.

Lubitsch, in league with Hoffenstein and Reinhardt, grants the heroine a robust, sensual appetite for life and a desire to run as freely as the filthy water in the pipes she unleashes with her hammer. Her eagerness is radiantly apparent in Jones’s superb performance—her headlong, striding walk and loose-limbed run; her eager consumption of crumpets; her speedy sartorial preparations for attacking a plumbing job (sleeves rolled up, stockings rolled down). But her hunger for experience is constrained at every turn by her sex, her lowly status as parlormaid, and her own pained need to fit in somewhere, which results in a misguided romantic alliance with Mr. Wilson (Richard Haydn), the nasally impaired prig of a local chemist with a throat-clogged mother (Una O’Connor). Mrs. Wilson never utters an articulate word in the film. She communicates her perpetual disapproval by throat-clearing, a further iteration of the corporeal plumbing metaphor performed to hilarious effect. Both son and mother are desperately in need of a violent bang to clear their stopped-up airways and another bang to jolt them out of their smug middle-class proprieties. Remember, we are in England in 1938. Far more ominous bangs will appear on the horizon soon to startle the Wilsons out of their complacency—in the form of bombs.

Because Cluny first arrives at the estate after hitching a ride with a gentry neighbor, Colonel Duff Graham (C. Aubrey Smith), the lord and lady mistake the maid for an old friend of the colonel’s, and graciously offer her tea, crumpets, and conversation, during which Cluny brings up her favorite subject, congested pipes. “When I was a young man,” Sir Henry remarks, “we never even discussed plumbing.” But the moment Cluny innocently blurts out that she thought they knew she was the new parlormaid, the scene is transformed into one of polite but acute discomfort. Lady Carmel reaches for the servant’s bell, and with that discreet gesture, followed by the sound of the ring, our heroine’s fate closes in on her. The housekeeper, Mrs. Maile (Sara Allgood)—supported by her partner in upholding the sanctities of place, the butler, Syrette (Ernest Cossart)—takes charge and informs her that, in her work, she is neither to be seen nor heard.

Both more comic and more excruciating is Cluny’s visit to the Wilsons’ house to celebrate the sixty-fifth birthday of the phlegm-inflicted Mrs. Wilson, a great occasion of no merriment, at which Mr. Wilson is prepared to announce his engagement to Miss Brown. The grim proceedings are interrupted by loud gurgling and coughing noises from recalcitrant pipes, precipitated by the only child guest, who has gone to the bathroom and washed his hands, apparently to disastrous effect. The irrepressible Cluny smiles knowingly, leaps from the table, rolls up her sleeves, and tells the astonished gathering of prudes that she may not make the best tripe and onions in England, “but whoever gets me won’t have to worry about his plumbing!” Happily rushing to the bathroom with her young cohort, who has begged her to let him “watch,” Cluny repairs the sink’s blockage, but not before Mr. Wilson has asked her not to and then closed the door on her, the boy, and the offending room in a classic Lubitsch shot: what goes on behind that barrier is not to be seen.

It is the aftermath of this excursion into the unmentionable that has always hit me the hardest. The mirthless birthday girl and her guests have all excused themselves. Mr. Wilson is seriously displeased and wishes to speak to his fiancée, but before he begins his lecture (mercifully left offscreen), he asks her to make herself “presentable.” The viewer watches as the meaning of this demand dawns on Cluny, and she begins to roll down her sleeves. The close-up of her face is a heartbreaking mixture of surprise and shame, her eyes glazed by tears. There are few close-ups in Cluny Brown—the stagnant sink is given one early on, as is a tipsy Cluny meowing on a sofa, but mostly the film takes place in medium shots with two or more characters in the frame.

It may be helpful to be a woman who has been punished for stepping out of her place while watching the exchange between Mr. Wilson and Miss Brown, but its feminist punch should be hard to miss. The odious man’s automatic assumption of superiority and his resulting condescension to the little lady who needs correction rob the heroine of her dignity, autonomy, and sexuality. The fact that the young woman’s aggressive sexual desire is presented by way of a plumbing metaphor not only allows for comedy, it also underscores the brutality of the injustice by emphasizing the irrationality of the prohibition. After all, as Adam wonders, why shouldn’t a woman go in for plumbing? To those who believe such taboos ended with open humping on the screen, I say: How many heterosexual men actually welcome forceful, lusty overtures from women?

It is in the nature of comedy that our heroes find a place for themselves in the end, but what is this place in Cluny Brown? It is not to be found on the pathetic little map of “our valley” that Mr. Wilson shows Cluny, or on any other map. Lubitsch once said he had been to Paris, France, and to Paris, Paramount, and had to admit he preferred Paris, Paramount—an imaginary Paris. When Cluny confides to Adam that she has dreamed about him riding a horse (and sitting it well, we are meant to infer) wearing a fez, and swooping her up in front of him on the stallion before he carries her away to his tent, the movie fan will note that the Czech philosopher has been transformed by night into a Tinseltown cliché, that dangerous if ridiculous Other of Hollywood exoticism played by Rudolph Valentino in the 1921 potboiler The Sheik. And when Adam leaves the Carmel estate and Sir Henry presses him to give an address, the roving intellectual responds, “General delivery,” an address that is no address. Happiness is spun from wishes in a dream factory, the exact location of which is anyone’s guess because the imagination is not tethered to place.