Day 33/35 - To Be or Not To Be (1942)

While I have seen the film To Be or Not to Be from Mel Brooks' 1983 adaptation of the 1942 film, I had never seen the Benny/Lombard production.

The persona of television star Jack Benny that I grew up with during the 1950s is not much evident in Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 satire To Be or Not to Be. Benny plays a great Polish actor that none of the Nazi characters have heard of. "What he did to Shakespeare," says one character, "is what we are doing to Poland." The film jokes stretch from theatre/Shakespeare jokes and evolve into anti-Nazi content. Some of the Benny's classic comic bits which should have illicited laughs seem forced. He comes, for example, into his apartment and finds Robert Stack in his bed. He does a double take, then a triple take, and a quaduple take, but none of them shows the timing he perfected on television.

Benny's co-star Carole Lombard fairs much better, and I found her character much more likeable than other roles I've seen her in. (Last year, I was shocked to see My Man Godfrey on the large screen, where I found her performance grating, shrill and highly forced. I found myself wishing for scenes where she didn't appear.) Lombard always seemed a fairly lightweight commedianne without the depth of other 1940s stars. Lombard died in a plane crash two months before the picture was released and her performance here for the first time made me wonder what she might have done had she lived.

The dark focus of the satire is that of a theatre company trapped in Warsaw as Hilter's troops invade the country. Among the troop is at least one Jewish actor, but although the concentration camps are mentioned, the Jews are not. One actor wants to play Shylock and quotes "Hath not a Jew eyes" three times without the word "Jew" ever mentioned. He says of another actor, "What you are, I wouldn't eat." "Are  you calling me a ham?" responds the other actor. Certainly in dark tones are the sense of destruction and occupation of the city. It seems pretty amazing for a 1942 film to take on the subject.

Interestingly for me was a running gag about the Nazi commandant Col. Ehrhardt's adjutant, Capt. Schultz, who is constantly blamed for getting Ehrhardt in trouble. I kept thinking of Sgt. Schultz who was a running joke, being blamed by Col. Klink of Hogan's Heroes.

I found the opening image of cameo portraits of Benny and Lombard funny as they are posed in the famous John Barrymore "Hamlet" pose.

Near the end of the film, Hitler visits the company's theatre with a large group of guards. It reminded me of a similar setup in Inglorious Bastards.

Although I found the comedy of the satire rather weak, I did find Lomard and the Warsaw backstory interesting.

To Be or Not to Be (1942), part of the Criterion Collection on Hulu Plus,***