To Be or Not to Be (1942 film)
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"Shocking and scandalous when released at the height of WWII, Ernst Lubitsch’s satire of Nazism is now remembered (rightly) as one of the funniest, bravest, noblest, most modern comedies Old Hollywood ever produced: a tribute to laughter in dark times, and a true essential."
— MUBI's take
To Be or Not to Be (1942 film)
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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To Be or Not to Be is a 1942 American black comedy film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, and featuring Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges and Sig Ruman. The plot concerns a troupe of actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who use their abilities at disguise and acting to fool the occupying troops. It was adapted by Lubitsch (uncredited) and Edwin Justus Mayer from the story by Melchior Lengyel. The film was released one month after actress Carole Lombard was killed in an airplane crash.
Why It Rocks
- With Jack Benny -- a radio comedian -- cast as a Nazi fighter, the plot of the movie being set in occupied Warsaw, jokes about concentration camps, and Nazis being portrayed as "harmless clowns?", there was a lot at steak at the time of its production, especially in the height of World War II. In the wrong hands, a film like this could have easily been callous and macabre, or tasteless and inappropriate, or even nothing more than Nazified slapstick (This is likely a reason why the film was so controversial when it was first released). And yet, Lubitsch designed the film with a unusual blend of comedy with stark terror, by interweaving farce and disaster in such a rigorously structured fashion as to elicit, in the very same scenes, genuine anxiety and a hilarity so acute that it has something like an ecstatic kick.
- Strong performances by a self-absorbed group of disguised, impersonating "ham" actors, who are willing to challenge, subvert, ridicule and mock the authoritarian political agenda of the Nazi regime and its main proponents.
- Carole Lombard (Maria Tura) is in last and greatest performance (she would be killed in a plane crash before the movie opened)
- Jack Benny (Joseph Tura) had a role that did justice to his comic genius.
- The buffoonish Nazi Colonel Ehrhardt is played by Sig Rumann, and what was the best role he ever had in his long film career.
- The genius of the film is that the actors work as a squabbling assortment of egotists and grumblers who needle one another even in the midst of danger, ham actors who cannot resist padding their lines even when carrying out an undercover mission against the Gestapo. This is clearly a film about theater, weaving in countless notes on the perils and uneasy joys of improvisation and impersonation, and relishing with infinite affection the many shades of actorly vanity.
- Even with all of the film's comedic moments, the possibility of real terror, real soul-destroying cruelty, real suffering, is never fully dropped. The fear is real, and even though each emerging danger is deflected by the most ingenious comic solution, another danger soon enough takes its place.
- Professor Siletsky is essential to the film because he is the only character taken dead seriously. The other Nazis in the story can be fooled — even Colonel Ehrhardt, who's a full-blown comical picture of evil (obsequious to superiors and tyrannical to underlings, lecherous and fatuously self-admiring, quick to bully and quicker to plead for mercy) has an ending is played for comedy. Siletsky is a figure of real evil and has to be killed outright, with no jokes. Everything that surrounds him is in earnest, giving a particularly sharp edge to the scene in which Maria visits him in his hotel room to intercept his exposure of the Polish resistance network.
- The director seems to deliberately challenge the stylistic and emotional equilibrium of his earlier work, as if to see how much stress it can take. By way of preparing the audience for what is in store, he lays down from the start a pattern of deception and reversal. We see Hitler walking the streets of prewar Warsaw; a moment later, we are given Jack Benny in the role of a Gestapo officer—something so shockingly unexpected that Benny’s own father, unprepared, walked out of the theater in disgust.
- Virtually no line is without a second meaning. As a result, the jokes come so rapidly a second viewing is usually necessary.
- In one scene, Lombard speaks of how her husband is always trying to take credit for everything. She concludes, "If we should ever have a baby, I'm not sure I'd be the mother." Benny's reply is, "I'm satisfied to be the father."