silver nitrate notes

To Be or Not to Be and the Comedy of Occupation

12 apr 2019

Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) directed To Be or Not to Be (1942) at United Artists during the war, with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny as the leads. The cinematographer was Rudolph Maté (whom we have met on The Passion of Joan of Arc fifteen years earlier). What Lubitsch produced is a comedy about a Polish theatre troupe that uses its acting skills to outwit the Gestapo in occupied Warsaw.

The film was released in February 1942, a month after Carole Lombard's death in a plane crash on a war-bond tour. The release was fraught. Critics, and some audiences, found the timing of a Nazi-themed comedy uncomfortable. The film was a moderate commercial success at best. Its reputation grew over the next thirty years, as audiences came to recognise that what Lubitsch had done was not light entertainment but moral satire of an extremely sharp kind.

Maté's photography is conventional studio work for the period, lit cleanly and shot at conversational distance. What Lubitsch does within those frames is more interesting. He places his actors in such a way that the audience can read the acted-versus-real performance at multiple levels simultaneously. Benny's character, the vain ham actor Joseph Tura, plays himself, plays Hitler, plays a Gestapo officer, plays Hamlet, plays a fictitious Polish professor, all within the film's running time. Lubitsch keeps the camera close enough to read Benny's face during each shift but at a distance that preserves the comedy's spatial intelligibility.

The famous line is the one Sig Ruman delivers as Colonel Ehrhardt: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." The line is, in 1942, a difficult joke. Lubitsch knew it was difficult. He kept it in the film anyway. It is the line on which the film's whole moral case hangs.

The remake by Mel Brooks in 1983 is enjoyable. It does not approach the original.

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sources
[1] Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. Simon & Schuster, 1993.
[2] Paul, William. Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy. Columbia UP, 1983.
[3] Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge UP, 3rd ed. 2003.
[4] Mayer, Edwin Justus. Screenplay (in Three Screen Comedies, Faber, 1991).