To Be or not to be

To Be or not to be – This 1942 film is the only Lubitsch picture derived from a script tailored to the screen – all of his other pictures were based on plays or literary works. To Be or not to be is deliriously clever and spectacularly well-written . The film’s audacity is in applying the techniques of a French bedroom farce to a grim spy picture. Some critics are a bit queasy about this film which seems to make light of concentration camps, Nazi torture, and anti-Semitism. But Lubitsch was a German Jew as was his frequent collaborator, Billy Wilder, and these men understood that they were entertainers, working in an entertainment industry. Accordingly, they viewed their role in a light fundamentally different from Hollywood’s current self-importance. For Lubitsch, soldiers fight and entertainers entertain. Accordingly, the rather macabre subject matter of To Be or not to be is treated as grist for the Hollywood entertainment mill – and, this insouciant, gay attitude was probably more helpful to the war effort than any number of grim documentaries or melodramatic, handwringing exposes of Nazi brutality. Lubitsch was Hollywood’s poet laureate of adultery and To be or not to be ingeniously combines that theme with a rather dour World War II spy melodrama. Jack Benny plays the cuckold who is forced into a situation in which his wife’s casual infidelity becomes instrumental in defending the Warsaw underground. Benny’s wife has enjoyed a fling with a Polish airman, played by an exceptionally babyish Robert Stack – his voice has barely changed and, sometimes, the future Eliot Ness speaks with a adolescent squeak. Lubitsch was a great director and, apparently, versatile. There are some action sequences that are highly effective in a compact, even rather strangled, style, similar, it seems, to the war-time dramas of Fritz Lang. In one sequences, Stack is pursued through a wintry woods, a criss-cross chase in which he hides beneath drifts of snow or deadfalls from swarming German troops that seem to appear from all sides. He escapes. In another sequence, a bad guy is pursued through a theater – again the people chasing him come from all angles and the scene has a convoluted, nightmarish geometry. (The picture is shot by Rudolph Mate and the scenes of Warsaw’s ruins buried in snow are indelibly wintry and chilling.) The script is full of one-liners and gags. In the last hour, everyone is acting a part, sometimes, two or three different parts. A scene in an opera house is staged with rows of massive-looking troops guarding boxes – it’s clear that Tarantino studied this scene as a model for the staging of the climax of Inglourious Basterds. Carole Lombard playing the unfaithful wife is spectacular. The acting company, which seems largely Jewish, is staging a concentration camp potboiler and she demands that she be allowed to wear a skin-tight white dress for her big flogging scene. Flirting with a Nazi agent, she proposes a toast. The Nazi, peering down the front of her décolletage says: “Shall we drink to a Blitzkrieg.” She responds: “I prefer a slow encirclement.”