Despite the bubbly erotic wit of Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 comedy, the movie's political satire is chillingly serious... The romantic roundelay, linking fine emotions with fine lingerie, is shadowed by the brutality of Soviet tyranny. Ample comic references to executions, forced confessions, Siberian prisons, censorship, and the secret police are matched by a sharp scene evoking the corrupt and bloodthirsty arrogance of the czarist aristocracy that the Revolution overthrew.