The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

War comedy

DIRECTOR

Ernst Lubitsch

WRITERS

Melchior Lengyel, Edwin Justus Mayer

STARS

Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Robert Stack

BEFORE

1940 The Shop Around the Corner, Lubitsch’s hit romantic comedy, is also set in Europe on the eve of World War II.

AFTER

1943 After the disappointing initial reception of To Be or Not to Be, Lubitsch returns to more conventional comedies with Heaven Can Wait.

1983 To Be or Not to Be is remade, with husband-and-wife comedy actors Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft in the lead roles.

It’s astonishing now to realize that Ernst Lubitsch’s hilarious satire of the Nazis began production in 1941, when the US had not yet entered World War II and was still maintaining neutrality. German-born Lubitsch set out to challenge that neutrality. Knowing the political risk he was taking, he took himself out of the studio system for the first time in his career and signed a deal with United Artists. This paid him less than his usual fee but gave him artistic control.

The story was unusual for Lubitsch in that it was not taken from an existing source, but was developed by him with two trusted collaborators, Hungarian screenwriter Melchior Lengyel, and US playwright Edwin Justus Mayer.

The movie’s release in March 1942 was marred by tragedy. Carole Lombard had died in a plane crash weeks earlier, while work was in postproduction.

Actors’ vanity

The starting point was Lubitsch’s memories of the vanity of actors during his years on the Berlin stage, and his observation that actors remain actors, no matter what situation they’re in. But the story quickly became much darker than that. Although it was made in Hollywood, the movie is set in Warsaw, Poland, in 1939, just as Germany is about to invade. The highly strung members of a theater company—led by Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) and the leading lady who is also his wife, Maria (Carole Lombard)—are rehearsing an anti-Nazi spoof by day and performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet by night. When Maria becomes romantically involved with a dashing young admirer, pilot Lieutenant Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack), she is drawn into a plan to track down a German spy who is about to endanger the Polish Resistance network. In a rapidly escalating farce, the actors (many of them Jewish) use their skills at disguise to fool the invading Nazis.

“I don’t know, it’s not convincing. To me, he’s just a man with a little moustache.”

Stage manager / To Be or Not to Be

Dark comedy

This sounds as much like the premise of a dark, intricate spy thriller as the light, romantic comedies for which Lubitsch was known, which is exactly what the director intended: a satire/comedy with dark intent. Lubitsch claimed that he wanted to steer clear of two traditional comedic formulas: “Drama with comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief. I had made up my mind to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time.” The movie succeeds in being both an anti-Fascist tract and, bizarrely, a showbiz satire (the self-obsessed Tura consoles himself with the thought that an audience member who walks out during his Hamlet soliloquy may have been suffering from a heart attack). The war provides the sobering counterpoint to the comedy: people die. There is a double edge to the code message that Sobinski passes to Maria, unwittingly via a double agent. “To be, or not to be,” it says, and as the Turas bravely lead their theater troupe in a deadly game of double bluff, it is clear that Lubitsch is using Hamlet’s famous line to question a complacent United States. To fight or not to fight, and let the Nazis get away with it? For Lubitsch, this was no question at all.

Jewish actor Bronski (Tom Dugan) and the other members of Tura’s cast fool the Germans by disguising themselves as Hitler and his entourage.

Born in Berlin in 1892, Ernst Lubitsch joined the Deutsches Theater in 1911. Two years later he made his screen debut in The Ideal Wife, but by 1920 his focus shifted to directing. He left for the US in 1922 to direct Mary Pickford in the hit movie Rosita, and made a smooth transition into sound. With Trouble in Paradise (1935) he found ways to smuggle risqué ideas past the censor: a trick known as “the Lubitsch touch.” This paid off in comedies such as Ninotchka (1939). He died in 1947 at 55.

1940 The Shop Around the Corner

1942 To Be or Not to Be

What else to watch: Trouble in Paradise (1932) ✵ Ninotchka (1939) ✵ The Shop Around the Corner (1940) ✵ Heaven Can Wait (1943) ✵ That Lady in Ermine (1948)