| Penny Folger |
To Be or Not to Be plays at the Trylon from Sunday, July 20th, through Tuesday, July 22nd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Hitler stands in a town square in Poland while dumbfounded townspeople encircle him, looking as though they’re witnessing a talking polar bear, or perhaps something much more absurd and dangerous. A small girl in the crowd suddenly pipes up, “May I have your autograph, Mr. Bronski?” and the jig is up. This is not Hitler at all, merely an actor who is dressed up to look like him. This is the setup for Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, a movie in which layers of reality and theatricality are often confused and intertwined. At one point in the film, its star, insecure, egotistical actor Joseph Tura, played by radio legend Jack Benny, impersonates an enemy in order to play out a very dangerous conversation. He later turns around and impersonates the other participant in the same scenario, and the whole conversation eerily, humorously, repeats itself.
A confusion between what is real and what is dramatic artifice, and a flip flopping between the two, is in a sense the real setting for this film (in addition to its literal setting of Warsaw around the time of Nazi occupation). But a bait and switch between layers of real life and dramatic artifice are an appropriate setting for a film whose protagonists are, after all, a theater troupe.
This movie begins immediately with some satire involving Nazis. You initially think their presence in the opening of the film is real, just as the aforementioned townspeople thought Hitler was standing in front of Mr. Mazlowski’s delicatessen in the streets of Warsaw a month before the invasion of their country. In real life, Benny’s own father made this mistake, and subsequently walked out of the film after its first few moments, not realizing his son’s turn as a Nazi was a satirical one. But the fact that it was Benny in a Nazi uniform should have indicated to audiences that there was going to be some sort of comedic element at play here, much like the presence of someone like Steve Martin or Seth Rogen might indicate that today.
The image that caused Jack Benny’s father to walk out of the theater.
Because, spoiler, Benny does not play a real Nazi here. His Joseph Tura is just a vain ham actor who seems more offended that a man walked out during his rendition of the famed Hamlet monologue (from which the film derives its title) than by the fact that the man was doing so to rendezvous with Tura’s own wife. This is an offense as well, mind you, but a lesser offense than his performance being slighted! Quips the play’s producer about Tura much later, “I hate to leave the fate of my country in the hands of a ham.”
Carole Lombard, who plays the adulterous wife, Maria Tura, is a fellow actor who speaks with the diplomacy of someone who never completely lets on what she’s actually thinking. It seems to leak out around her edges, in snippets of innuendo, all the same. You can glean it more from the slightest change in her countenance than you can from the words that are coming out of her mouth.
Her relationship with two different men: her husband, and Sobinski—her young male monologue-abandoning suitor, played by a very young Robert Stack (later of Airplane!, The Untouchables, and Unsolved Mysteries fame) seems pretty progressive for 1942. Yet the movie never punishes her for these transgressions. She has no intention of leaving her husband—you can tell she is incredulous when Sobinski suggests this—but at the same time she’s more than happy to have her fun on the side. Such a “fallen” woman, doing what she pleases but also what she needs to do to get by, would be punished in another film of the era by inevitably having her meet untimely ends. But she is curiously not used here as a morality tale. Her infidelity is instead made into somewhat of a recurring punchline.
You can even understand her point of view—she enjoys liaisons with attractive young men (at the time of filming Lombard would have been 33, Stack 22, and Benny 47) but the presumptuousness that she would leave the theater for them, and also her husband, just won’t do. Her innuendo, and the movie’s, continues. Says Sobinski very earnestly, “You might not believe it, but I can drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes!” Maria’s unblinking response to this says it all: “Really?” “Does that interest you?” Sobinski asks. “It certainly does,” Maria says, as if in a trance. The disapproving frown her maid shoots them during this exchange, unnoticed by the would be lovers, communicates the rest.
Says someone to Maria later in the film, “I wonder if you even know what Nazism stands for.” She replies, “I have a slight idea.” Her character seems to be the president of understatement.
This film’s initial reception was quite mixed, drawing criticism and controversy for its subject matter, but it was also completely overshadowed by the shocking death of Lombard in a plane crash before the film was even released. On the former point, Bosley Crowther wrote a scathing review of the film in this era that brings to mind that expression in comedy, “Too soon?” As he put it, “To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case.”1 If you consider the timeline, Poland was invaded in September 1939, and the United States entered the war officially in December 1941. To Be or Not to Be was released in the U.S. in February 1942, and the war would not end, as far as they were concerned, for another 3 1/2 years. In our modern era the film feels clever, satirical, and was clearly ahead of its time. But it’s all the more subversive and daring in its own time, considering it was released when the war had scarcely begun, and was openly mocking one of our largest adversaries. The timeliness of this is precisely why so many critics took offense.
There was one line in particular about which they seemed the most upset. Says Crowther, “What is the element of mirth in the remark which a German colonel makes regarding Mr. Benny’s acting: ‘What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland’? Even if one were able to forget the present horror which this implies, the butchery of a people would hardly be matter for jest.’”2
It’s no surprise that Mel Brooks loved this movie. It has his humor, and his fascination with making Hitler into comedy, written all over it. Even an early line, when the Hitler impersonator, Mr. Bronski says, “Heil myself,” feels like it could have been taken straight from Brooks, if only he were not a mere teenager at the time of the film’s release. It’s no wonder that Brooks had remade the entire film by the age of 57. People like Quentin Tarantino were also influenced by this film, most obviously in his own film about Nazis and Hitler convening in a theater—those who ran the theater being similarly opposed.
Nazis are another element in the film that were played differently here than in more traditional Hollywood depictions. Lubistch renders his Nazis not as over-the-top cardboard cut-out villains but as more run of the mill, flawed human beings—which, surprisingly, makes them all the more insidious.
Said Lubitsch when defending the film against its criticisms, “My Nazis are different… Brutality, flogging and torturing have become their daily routine. They talk about it with the same ease as a salesman referring to the sale of a handbag. Their humor is built around concentration camps, around the sufferings of their victims. Are those people really so harmless?”3
In the end, Lubitsch defends himself by blaming any success the film might find upon his audiences, “If I have shown bad taste in playing comedy against a Warsaw background, the audiences who are enjoying that kind of humor are just as guilty.”4 For modern audiences, for whom the Nazi occupation of Europe has become a distant chapter in history, any guilt found in the enjoyment of this movie has waned. Or perhaps, with any parallels to our perceived modern-day reality, this movie can provide a special kind of comic relief.
Footnotes
1 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen,” The New York Times, March 7, 1942.
2 Bosley Crowther, “Against a Sea of Troubles; In ‘To Be Or Not To Be,’ Ernst Lubitsch Has Opposed Real Tragedy With an Incongruous Comedy Plot,” The New York Times, March 22, 1942.
3 Ernst Lubitsch, “Mr. Lubitsch Takes the Floor for Rebuttal,” The New York Times, March 29, 1942.
4 Ernst Lubitsch, “Mr. Lubitsch Takes the Floor for Rebuttal,” The New York Times, March 29, 1942.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon