To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Directed and produced by Ernst Lubitsch

Josef and Maria Tura (Jack Benny, Carole Lombard) are the leading lights of a successful drama company in 1939 Warsaw. Josef is having trouble with his parts, distracted because he fears Maria is romantically involved with a young military pilot (Robert Stack). As well, the company’s new play, satirising the Nazi leadership in neighbouring Germany, has just been banned. Their personal and professional problems, however, are submerged in a vastly greater disaster when the world war starts with the bombing of their city. It seems a simple - and complicated - few steps from there to the couple’s involvement with the Polish underground, and a plot to stop a traitor. All the while, Josef keeps hoping to play Hamlet…

Believe it or not, this is a comedy, a daring and black comedy, from a time when the subject brought few smiles. Of ‘service comedies’, there were many in the 1940s, but actually wringing laughs from a military invasion, from treason, destruction and wholesale executions, is another matter. It sounds like the pinnacle (or nadir) of bad taste. That To Be or Not To Be is instead a classic of cinema – and cinema comedy - is due to the screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer (original story by Melchior Lengyel), the direction, the cinematography (by Rudolf Maté), and the acting of Lombard, Benny and the rest of the cast.

An indication of the quality of this film – and Lubitsch’s work in general – comes in a scene in which Maria is told something that makes her believe that Josef has been killed; a few seconds later, she realises he has not. The script has her feel two opposing emotions in almost as many seconds; the direction demands that she show the audience both while conveying only one to the other character in the scene; the acting makes it possible.

It’s unlikely that the viewer will find any scene uproariously funny; the humour is, however, constant and genuine. It’s intelligent humour, too, clever, that sometimes requires a little thought from the audience. As an example, an actor named Greenberg denigrates a fellow thespian by commenting, “What you are, I won’t eat.” On another occasion, Maria, fretting that Josef’s ego denies her just due as an actress, bemoans, “If we had a baby, you’d want to be the mother!” To which, Josef, suspicious of his wife’s fidelity, replies, “I’d be satisfied to be the father…”

But the humour fits the occasions. In darker moments, it is sardonic, rather than amusing. The remarks made while the actors are hiding in a cellar, their city being destroyed above them, reminded me of the manner in which comments were made during surgeries in the tv series MASH, spoken without an accompanying laugh-track.

Lombard is a mistress of comic acting, while Benny, a success on radio and, later, on television, had not impressed many in movies until To Be or Not To Be. He perhaps needed the famed ‘Lubitsch Touch’. The other actors contribute handily, especially Stanley Ridges, scarcely recognisable in facial hair, as a silkily sinister traitor, and Sig Ruman as a Gestapo officer. (Look quickly at a brief depiction of his schedule: just after Maria Tura’s appointment is one for someone called Schindler. Probably a coincidence, but it would not have surprised me at all if Lubitsch, famous for his meticulous detail, had heard of the-then obscure Oskar Schindler in some capacity and had used the name.)

The plot is more complicated than in most comedies, with impersonations, misunderstandings and crises cleverly building on each other. Particularly good is the sequence in which Josef, disguised, must persuade the Gestapo that he is really whom he claims to be, and the real man the imposter, while, unbeknownst to him, his friends are hatching a plan to help him by revealing him to be the fake.

The setting for To Be or Not To Be was, I think, unprecedented at the time. Humour in war-movies would be included in a line or two, here and there, maybe a character for comic relief, but to place a whole comedy in a time and place of death and oppression was unheard of, and the movie was handled roughly by many critics at the time.

What they failed to realise was that humour is one of mankind’s most potent weapons. Comics have paid for their jokes with their liberty and their lives. Yet they make those jokes – and tyrants punish them for it – because both know the power of humour. It can be a shield against terror and a bludgeon against evil; that’s how Lubitsch uses it here. Everything works in To Be or Not to Be.