To Be or Not to Be (1942) | |
Background
To Be or Not to Be (1942) is Berlin Germany-born director Ernst Lubitsch's sophisticated screwball masterpiece, with satirical comedy, romance, and suspense. The controversial anti-war comedy about espionage and politics from producer Alexander Korda - marked by incisive black humor - was a bold cinematic work during the World War II years that skewered and lampooned the tyrannical leader Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and the Third Reich, while still being completely entertaining in its story of marital conflict. One of the film's underlying objectives was to portray the threatening German military leaders as incompetent and bungling, deluded, frightened of their leader, vulnerable, stupid and foolish. Artistic performances by a self-absorbed group of disguised, impersonating "ham" actors (who had been forbidden to perform an anti-Hitler play in their own theatre) took to their own 'stage' (with clever tricks of the trade) to challenge, subvert, ridicule and mock the authoritarian political agenda of the Nazi regime and its main proponents. [Note: Charlie Chaplin's courageous comedy The Great Dictator (1940) was similar in its brave, absurdist satirical view of the Nazis and their leader.] Shortly before the film's release (during post-production), one of its stars, Hollywood's beloved Carole Lombard (blonde wife of Clark Gable), died at the age of 33 in a tragic airplane crash near Las Vegas on January 16, 1942. She was returning from a War Bond promotional tour. The script was developed both by Lubitsch and Hungarian writer Melchior Lengyel, whose original story was the basis for Lubitsch's previous film Ninotchka (1939) - the earlier film garnered Lengyel a Best Original Screenplay nomination (it lost to Gone With the Wind (1939)). Lubitsch's and Lengyel's comedic material was then put into script form by New York playwright Edwin Justus Mayer. Rudolph Maté's cinematography resembled his earlier Oscar-nominated work in another black and white WWII-era espionage-spy thriller, Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940). It was an historically-fearful time in late 1941 and early 1942 and audiences were not prone to easily accept a comedy at that time (e.g., the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Moscow (the German invasion of Russia on the Eastern Front), the torpedo-sinking of Britain’s Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal by a German U-boat, deportations of thousands of Jews to concentration camps, the spread of Fascism over Europe, and Lombard's death). The title's "To Be or Not to Be" - Hamlet's existential contemplation of suicide in the play that resonated throughout the script, could have been rephrased as a decision-making assertion to ambivalent Americans: "To act or not to act." In the propagandistic anti-Nazi farce, the two stars (a theatrical couple) of a shabby, Polish Shakespearean acting troupe were introduced: the hilarious, egocentric Polish actor Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) and his flirtatious, zany blonde wife Maria (Carole Lombard). When their never-performed anti-Nazi play (titled Gestapo) was censored by the Nazi officials, the only production allowed was their continuing performances of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The main suspenseful plot, occurring during World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, was a daring plan to help protect young Polish flier Lt. Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack) in the British RAF. The young fugitive pilot was madly in platonic, idolizing love with Joseph's beguiling wife Maria - it was a traditional romantic comedy love triangle. In an early continuing joke, the cuckolded husband cued the surreptitious lovers to privately rendezvous each night when he began Hamlet's famous soliloquy "To be or not to be" on-stage, and Sobinski noisily departed the theater's second row for a chaste tryst in her dressing room. The actors in the Polish troupe had to prevent Prof. Alexander Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), a traitorous imposter and Nazi spy sent from England, from delivering names of Resistance family members (of Polish airmen in the RAF) to the Gestapo. The performers became engaged in a complex plot to help the Resistance Underground by masquerading as the Gestapo, using the props and costumes from their production in order to outwit the Nazis, led by bumbling simpleton Nazi Colonel "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman). Hammy and vain Joseph gave priceless imitations of Hamlet, Colonel Ehrhardt and Professor Siletsky and other disguises to fool the gullible Nazis. The marvelous farcical comedy - an effective example of political propaganda, received only one Academy Award nomination (among a total of 18 nominees!): Best Musical Score (for a Drama or Comedy). The award was won by Austrian-American composer Max Steiner for the romantic drama Now, Voyager (1942). Neither of the two leads, hilarious comedian and radio star Jack Benny (in the most significant film of his career) or Carole Lombard received nominations - probably because the film was considered too insensitive, tasteless or offensive (and politically dangerous), or too close to home for homefront audiences. Two lines in particular were criticized - (1) the impersonated Colonel's callous joke: "We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping," and (2) the Nazi Colonel's comment about poor acting: "As a matter of fact, I saw him [Joseph Tura] on the stage when I was in Warsaw, once before the war....What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland." Mel Brooks' Nazi-spoofing was right on target in the smash-hit The Producers (1967), especially in the memorable "Springtime for Hitler" sequence. However, the same director's remake To Be or Not to Be (1983) was a financial failure, often in bad taste and overacted in part, but moderately well-reviewed. A Broadway stage version, also titled To Be or Not to Be, opened in 2008 and played for only a few months. There were hints of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (2006) (aka Zwartboek) and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) in Lubitsch's masterwork. The Story Just before the title screen, the principal performers, Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, were introduced with their names and a short visual clip. The credits were heard with Frédéric Chopin's 1938 Polonaise in A major, Op. 40, No. 1, 'Military'. The opening voice-over by the Narrator was accompanied by newsreel-like views of a city square (Warsaw, Poland) and four storefronts, all named after their Polish owners (ending in -SKI). To everyone's shock and amazement, Polish onlookers gazed and gawked in awe in the direction of a uniformed, mustached Adolf Hitler, the infamous Nazi dictator, who calmly strolled down the busy Warsaw sidewalk, and stopped in front of J. Maslowski's Delikatesy:
In the inner offices of the Nazi secret police, a young Wilhelm Coetze, a member of the Hitler Youth group, was ushered in to speak to the officious Nazi Colonel (Jack Benny), who presented the boy with an outright bribe - a toy military tank. The gift-reward for his positive report card was intended to create loyalty and change his father's negative opinion of "The Fuhrer" ("Maybe he will like the Fuhrer a little better, won't he?"). The boy admitted that his father had said "funny things" about the Fuhrer:
Suddenly, the Fuhrer himself entered the office - to a chorus of numerous "Heil Hitler" salutes. The Hitler look-alike in a Nazi uniform saluted back: "Heil myself."
Sitting at a desk on a theater's main stage, the strict producer Mr. Dobosh (Dobosz) (Charles Halton) stood up and reprimanded the actor playing the character of Hitler, a Polish actor named Bronski (Tom Dugan): "That's not in the script!" Disagreements arose amongst the various actors and the humorless producer.
Dobosh ordered his cast to take the play seriously:
He was interrupted by the slinky entrance of the theater's female star Maria Tura (Carole Lombard) wearing a tight, dazzling, floor-length, form-fitting satin gown: "Is that what you're going to wear in the concentration camp?" She thought it was an appropriate contrast to the grim conditions of a camp: "Think of me being flogged in the darkness. I scream, suddenly the lights go on, and the audience discovers me on the floor in this gorgeous dress." Dobosh vehemently disagreed with her costume proposal, and lost his temper: "That a great star, an artist, could be so inartistic. You must be out of your mind." Her egotistical, self-important and vain husband, Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) briefly defended Maria, and Dobosh was forced to back down. However, Joseph privately told his wife: "The dress stinks." They thought of themselves as competitive rivals for the same spotlight - she sarcastically called him: "the greatest actor in the world" and an attention-grabber, while he called her a "prima donna" who always diverted attention to herself. They traded barbed quips at each other:
Mr. Dobosh complained that Bronski's Hitler portrayal and his unbelievable costuming were unsatisfactory, and then told off the make-up man (Armand 'Curly' Wright) - "It's not convincing. To me, he's just a man with a little mustache." The crew member responded: "But so was Hitler." Dobosh added: "I just can't smell Hitler in him." Greenberg disagreed: "I can." Bronski defended himself: "I'm a nobody and I have to take a lot. But I know I look like Hitler, and I'm gonna prove it right now. I'm goin' out on the street and see what happens."
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