For all these reasons, cinephiles and filmmakers (and cinephilic filmmakers) revere Lubitsch\u2019s To Be or Not to Be<\/em>, including Mel Brooks, who faithfully remade it in 1983, and Quentin Tarantino, who paid it loving homage in Inglourious Basterds <\/em>in 2009\u2014long (and longer) after the threat of the Third Reich had passed, though the controversial nature of satirizing it had not. (See also Roberto Begnini\u2019s Life is Beautiful <\/em>[1997] and Taika Waititi\u2019s JoJo Rabbit <\/em>[2019].<\/em>) <\/p>\n\n\n\n With an ominous voiceover narration, To Be or Not to Be <\/em>opens on the streets of Warsaw, August 1939, on the eve of Nazi occupation. Adolph Hitler and his minions terrorize the Polish people from newly erected Gestapo headquarters. But, wait. Five minutes in, Lubitsch lets us in on the joke: this is not really <\/em>Hitler and his henchmen, but the Theatr Polski\u2019s acting troupe rehearsing their latest production, \u201cThe Gestapo,\u201d on a stage set. All is not as it seems to be, as the film\u2019s title comes to mean\u2014a deadly serious line borrowed from Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet <\/em>and made into a running gag. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This first revelation that appearances deceive comes as theater director Jan Dobosz (Charles Halton) interrupts his players to lambast them for hamming it up, particularly after the actor playing Hitler, Bronski (Tom Dugan) improvises a zinger, \u201cHeil myself!\u201d Dobosz fumes: \u201cI want everybody to understand this! This is a serious play! A realistic drama! A document of Nazi Germany!\u201d At this point, the troupe\u2019s grand diva Maria Tura (Lombard) waltzes on stage draped in a gleamingly-white satin dress, studded in diamonds and hemmed in fur. Dobosz is shocked. \u201cIs that what you\u2019re going to wear in the concentration camp?,\u201d he asks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWell, why not?,\u201d Lombard-as-Maria deadpans, \u201cI think it\u2019s a tremendous contrast. Think of me being flogged in the darkness. I scream. Suddenly the lights go on, and the audience discovers me in this gorgeous <\/em>dress!\u201d Troupe member Greenberg (Felix Bressart) agrees: \u201cThat\u2019s a terrific laugh,\u201d he enthuses, much to director Dobosz\u2019s consternation. When troupe headliner Josef Tura (Benny), Maria\u2019s husband and her equal-in-ego, agrees with Dobosz that \u201cthe dress stinks,\u201d Maria accuses him of professional jealousy (afraid she\u2019s stealing his spotlight), and we\u2019re off into the Lubitschian territory of marital power dynamics, witty banter, and sexual innuendo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pay attention; Lubitsch is a master, and he moves fast. The economy of this metadramatic minute and a half of filmmaking is remarkable. The film\u2019s main characters, who are stage actors<\/em>, are introduced with great efficiency, capitalizing on the audiences\u2019 extradiegetic familiarity with its film actors<\/em>: with Benny\u2019s radio persona (hilariously vain and petty) and Lombard\u2019s reputation as fashion-obsessed. Genre is announced, and subverted: To Be or Not to Be <\/em>will be an anti-Nazi drama, interrupted by comedy. And, Lubitsch is insisting, this genre mash-up is highly intentional. He is asserting himself as Dobosz\u2019 antithesis, a director with a sense of humor and total control: of the laughs, his actors, and the high-wire act itself of satirizing Nazism\u2014already proven plenty controversial in Charlie Chaplin\u2019s The Great Dictator <\/em>(1940). Thus, the scene anticipates criticisms that To Be or Not to Be<\/em> is in bad taste and \u201ccallous\u201d (Bosley Crowther), because it contains the \u201cunreconcilable modes\u201d of comedy and anti-Nazism (The Times <\/em>of London), and maybe even aids Nazism by treating it lightly. The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>\u2019s critic <\/em>went so far as to suggest, absurdly, that Lubitsch might be a Nazi sympathizer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the contrary, Lubitsch will go on to argue in the film\u2019s cycle of Nazi fakes play-acting at\u2014and making a mockery of\u2014Nazism is a powerful means to deflate and defeat it. It undermines Riefenstahlian triumphalism by underscoring that Nazis themselves are only pretending <\/em>to be supermen. Hitler, as the aforementioned opening scene argues, is \u201cjust a man with a little mustache.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To Be or Not to Be<\/em>\u2019s plot is complicated, but here\u2019s the gist: Forced by Nazi command to cancel \u201cThe Gestapo,\u201d the Teatr Polski puts up Hamlet <\/em>instead. Knowing her husband-as-Hamlet will chew up the \u201cTo be or not to be\u201dsoliloquy for a good ten minutes, Maria invites a handsome admirer\u2014a pilot named Stanislav Sobinski (a baby-faced Robert Stack)\u2014to her dressing room each night as Josef launches into it. There, the young flier lets fly the un-subtlest of innuendo, in which his bomber is a powerful phallus, and Maria swoons. But their consummation\u2014and the Code-defying \u201cLubitsch touch\u201d\u2014is cut off by the real Nazi invasion. Lieutenant Sobinski reports to the RAF in London, and thus launches the film\u2019s spy thriller elements. There, Sobinski detects the machinations of Professor Selitzky, a Nazi collaborator posing as a star of the Polish resistance. To stop Selitzky from delivering a list of Polish resistors to the Gestapo, Sobinski parachutes back into Warsaw and enlists the help of the Teatr Polksi troupe, thus dropping the film back into its comedy-of-errors elements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To contribute to the cause, Maria puts on her \u2018concentration camp\u2019 dress and a grand performance in the Nazi-occupied Hotel Europejski in order to seduce Selitzky, feigning openness to his sexual advances and <\/em>to Nazism. Selitzky lures, \u201cShall we drink to a blitzkrieg,\u201d and Maria purrs, \u201cNo, I prefer a slow encirclement,\u201d followed by an orgasmic exclamation of \u201cHeil Hitler\u201d (the film ever spoofing the Nazi salute). Mid-seduction, Selitzky is called to Gestapo headquarters by its chief, Colonel Erhardt. But, wait, this is another fake, again the theater troupe pretending (and Tura refusing to be upstaged by Maria). With \u201cThe Gestapo\u201d sets and costumes, and Tura headlining as Erhardt, they put on a convincing show, briefly. But when Josef\u2019s bad acting gives them away, Selitzky tries to run, is shot, and dies dramatically on stage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Two acts remain. The next has Josef impersonating Selitzky to meet the real<\/em> Col. Erhardt, a Nazi every bit as buffoonish as Josef\u2019s (previous) imitation; and has Maria pretending to be Hitler\u2019s lover. The final act is the biggest of all, with the entire troupe at the occupied Teatr Polski, this time with the real <\/em>Hitler in attendance, along with a swastika-draped auditorium full of Nazi officers. (Did I mention Tarantino\u2019s homage in Inglourious Basterds<\/em>?) Playing himself as the Polish patriot and Shakespearean humanist he is in reality, Greenberg distracts Hitler\u2019s guard, and allows Bronski-as-Hitler, Benny-as-Earhardt, and the troupe-as-stormtroopers to usher them away, pretending to have foiled the underground plot they are in fact enacting. They have played at being Nazis in order to be effective anti-Nazi resistors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lubitsch makes a good argument for the subversive power of humor; \u201cA laugh is nothing to sneeze at,\u201d Greenberg insists in that opening scene. Still, some of the contemporaneously controversial lines of dialogue still elicit a cringe, still taste pretty bad. For instance, Josef-as-Erhardt, doing his best to imitate Gestapo heartlessness, laughs with Selitzky about concentration camps and jokes, \u201cWe do the concentrating; the Poles do the camping.\u201d And the real Erhardt criticizes Josef\u2019s acting skills to (Josef-as-)Selitzky, quipping, \u201cWhat he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland.\u201d Though meant to satirize Nazism, both lines come dangerously close to making a joke of human slaughter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether or not to excuse such lines might affect a casual film fan\u2019s decision as to whether \u2018To Watch or Not to Watch\u2019 Lubitsch\u2019s masterpiece. But anyone seriously interested in Hollywood history can save themselves the existential waffling: To Be or Not to Be <\/em>is required viewing. “To Be or Not to Be” is now streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/to-be2-1024x576.jpg\")
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