To Be Or Not To Be

Carole Lombard's last film, released posthumously, was Ernest Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, a strange film, as it is a comedy about Nazis, released right in the middle of the war. Like Casablanca, it has to be considered in context--when this movie was made, there was no outcome in sight. Unlike say, The Producers, it was rather bold to satirize Hitler while he was still conquering Europe.

The film is set in Poland just before and after the German invasion. Lombard and Jack Benny play the most famous actors in Warsaw, and they are performing Hamlet while also rehearsing a satire about the Nazis, which they are forced to abandon by the censors. Lombard is being seduced by a young air force pilot (Robert Stack, who in fact was in love with Lombard since he was a teenager). Stack keeps leaving the theater when Benny begins the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, so he can pitch woo to Lombard in her dressing room.

The central plot has the acting troupe playing spies, as Benny assumes the role of a double agent who has the goods on the Polish underground. He interacts with Sig Roman as a bumptious colonel of the gestapo, who doesn't know what to think, lest he offend Hitler. Critics at the time were aghast that fun would be made of this subject, and I wonder if, as with Chaplin in The Great Dictator, Lubitsch would have made this film if he knew exactly what was happening in the concentration camps.

It is telling that Mel Brooks' remade this film with the benefit of hindsight. I haven't seen that film, but it might be easier to laugh at. Removed from context, To Be Or Not To Be is a gentle comedy. Benny was known to several generations as a radio or then a TV actor--this would be his only major film role, and while his famous comic timing is on display here he wasn't really a leading man. Lombard pretty much plays it straight, toning down her manic screwball comedy persona.

Many consider To Be Or Not To Be a great classic, but I don't know. I didn't really laugh much and even today I found the Nazi stuff unsettling. When commenting on Benny's reputation as an actor, Roman says, "He does to Shakespeare what we are doing to Poland." That's not so funny, in retrospect.