Given what we’re living through now, we may be better positioned than any previous generation of Americans to comprehend the full emotional breadth of a film comedy in which Death is one of the central sources of humor. Of course it helps if said film is one of the funniest and most perfect comedies ever made, like Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942). And, of course, Death isn’t the film’s only source of humor: Marital infidelity, the perpetual egomania of actors, and the inherent ineptitude of totalitarian armies also play key roles thematically. But Death is, unmistakably, this film’s comic essence, and a great many people over the decades have had trouble accepting that fact.
The trouble comes partly from the film’s historical circumstances. When Ernst Lubitsch made To Be or Not to Be in 1941, Europe was at war but America was not yet involved. Then came Pearl Harbor, and then came the film’s release. Both critics and audiences included many who found it less than funny (a line which in later decades became one of the film’s biggest laughs drew particular outrage). This was an earlier America. The phrase black humor was not yet part of our conceptual vocabulary; “good taste” was a prevailing social concept; and movies were the most sanitized, as well as the most popular, of the public arts. Thus the overall response to To Be or Not to Be was distinctly negative, and Lubitsch was deeply hurt by the hostile tone of some of the reviews. Years had to pass before the film could work its way up to its current status as a classic, and the film-loving public could learn to appreciate both the subtlety and the daring of what Lubitsch had done.
The film’s daring begins with the glorious absurdity of its premise. Because people under 40 are probably unfamiliar with the name of Jack Benny, I had better explain. Benny (1894–1974) had been a vaudevillian who began as a violinist and made a joke of his limited abilities on that instrument. As the comic element took over his act, he worked from vaudeville into nightclubs, Broadway revues, and early movie musicals before finding his optimal medium in radio. He could be heard broadcasting weekly from 1932 to 1955, when he switched to television, and the home viewers discovered that the famous dry inflections and deadpan silences of his radio show had hilariously minimalist facial expressions to match. It is hard to convey to those who have not seen or heard Benny how deeply and widely he was loved, or how extensively his jokes—many having to do with his supposed parsimony or his glum view of life—were quoted. A famous example from his radio show will serve as a quintessence. Robber: “Your money or your life.” Long silence. Robber: “Well?” Benny: “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”
If you wanted to pitch a story to a movie executive in 1939 and you began with the sentence, “Imagine Jack Benny as the greatest Shakespearean actor in Poland,” you would have no need to continue: There would be a production contract in front of you as soon as the executive could pick himself up from where he had fallen on the floor laughing. Despite the violin (which he actually played rather well), Benny was the epitome of the well-behaved middle-class urban businessman—fastidious, a little fussy, perpetually insecure, always fretting about money and about the world’s failure to recognize his inherent worth. To cast him as an eminent Shakespearean was a slapstick gesture in itself.
And he was to be a Polish Shakespearean. Lubitsch, a cultivated Berlin-born theater man who had spent his formative years acting for and assisting the great director Max Reinhardt at his Deutsches Theater, knew perfectly well that Poland had an extensive high-culture tradition, and had produced many artists of quality. But he also knew, after 16 years in the United States and many adventures in Hollywood filmmaking, what Americans in general thought of Poland: that it was a country of florid-faced, beer-bellied industrial workers of limited intelligence, whose family names all ended in -ski. Jokes about the proverbial stupidity or vulgarity of Poles had been common for more than a century, immigrating from Europe like Poles themselves (including Benny’s father, whose son was born Benjamin Kubelsky), and often imported from Germany or Russia, the two nations that had tromped over most of Poland in military boots for centuries. All the Chopin concerts in the world weren’t going to erase that stereotype. Even Shakespeare’s Hamlet itself contains an anti-Polish slur: The Ghost is described as looking the way the late King Hamlet had looked when “he smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.”
The German invasion of Poland in September 1939, had somewhat abated the stereotype: Poles were now brave innocents being crushed under the Nazi jackboot. But recollections of the cliché lingered, and they hover in the air over To Be or Not to Be. Lubitsch takes pains to present the Poles as, on the whole, both virtuous and brave resisters of Nazi oppression, but there is an occasional hint that their brains are not always up to the task, or that they might let their emotions run away with them. In other words, Poles are human beings, and as such have the fallibility that makes all of humanity a ripe target for a satirist with Lubitsch’s comic sense.
What keeps Lubitsch’s view of the Poles in balance is what he makes of the Germans. Lubitsch had not been in Germany during the years of Hitler’s rise to power, but he kept abreast of European news, and he knew the “Aryan” mentality well. He had begun his movie career as a stereotype Jewish comedian in early silent two-reelers with titles such as Meyer aus Berlin (Meyer from Berlin) and Schuhpalast Pinkus (Pinkus’ Shoe Palace). He had swiftly evolved upward from this to become a major director, first in the German and then in the international film world, but he well knew the extent to which someone of his ethnicity would always be viewed as a suspicious outsider. One of his early silent features, Sumurun (1920), began as a stage pantomime by Reinhardt, set at the court of an imaginary Oriental potentate, in which Lubitsch appeared onstage—and repeats his role in the film version which he himself directed—as a hunchbacked jester hopelessly in love with a beautiful dancing girl: practically a walking definition of outsider.
In Hollywood, however, Lubitsch was an insider, one who had learned to play the studio game with proven success—though his previous film, the independently produced That Uncertain Feeling, had been one of his rare failures. (It had been preceded by two of his greatest works, Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner.) Hollywood’s notion of success did not fool Lubitsch. He had talked his way into contracts that were the envy of his profession and executive positions that were other men’s dream of absolute power; in these situations he had sometimes made triumphs and sometimes made messes. But he had always clung to his basic principles as an artist. Not all of his movies are equally successful artistically, but they all have the completeness of style that shows you one sensibility is in charge of everything.
And the news from Europe told him how valuable those basic principles were, as compared with Hollywood’s gaudier rewards. The Nazis had a particular loathing for the influence of Hollywood, with its strong immigrant-Jewish presence, and Lubitsch, a German Jew who had come to Hollywood because of his great initial success in Germany, was a particular target of Nazi loathing. In Marcel Ophüls’ great documentary about the Nazi occupation of France, The Sorrow and the Pity (1972), there is a brief newsreel clip showing an exhibit of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. In one of its display cases, there is a caricature of Lubitsch, with his “Jewish” nose grossly distended. The camera lingers over it for an instant, a backhanded tribute to the artist whose genius could inspire such hatred. So as we move on to discuss the dynamics of To Be or Not to Be, we need to keep in mind how fully aware Lubitsch was of the pain involved in each of the movie’s transactions, and how deeply personal that pain was to him. While making this sometimes lightheaded, almost giddy comedy, he did not conceal, from either his audience or himself, its emotional cost.
To Be or Not to Be opens with a classic Lubitsch bait-and-switch: a jocose mock newsreel that appears to be A) making fun of Polish shopkeepers’ names and B) showing Hitler, by himself, in full uniform on the streets of Warsaw at a time before the Nazis had invaded Poland. Both of these turn out to be fictional ploys, and the newsreel itself is revealed to be a joke, as we shift to the theater company whose interactions will be the film’s main focus. Lubitsch’s response to the implication that Polish shopkeepers’ names are funny will come, not many minutes later, when the actual Nazi invasion occurs and we see that bombing raids have left the “funny” shop signs a smoldering ruin. We have moved quickly into the discomfort zone that many scenes of the film will occupy, and we were forewarned that it was heading in that direction. Yes, in 1942 it must have been damn painful, and possibly still is to many Poles. But the pain is balanced by our awareness, as we move deeper into the discomfort, that Lubitsch will never denigrate the reality involved. His challenge is to make us laugh while we continue to shudder at the pain.
The first set of laughs comes from the behavior of the theater troupe headed by Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) and his glamorous wife, Maria (Carole Lombard). The jokes come in two categories, both of which will resonate through the discomfiting passages; the comedy and the pain will be densely tangled together. The first category is actors’ ego: The anti-Nazi play the company is rehearsing looks quite serious—deadly serious, in fact—but the actors keep trying to stick laughs into it, as a way of padding their parts, while Maria insists on being glamorously costumed even when she appears as a concentration camp prisoner. (Even in this familiar and seemingly harmless arena, the film has walked deliberately onto unsafe ground.) We note that a bit player with a Jewish look and a Jewish name, Greenberg (Felix Bressart), dreams of playing Shylock, one of whose most famous passages he delivers. And we note, quietly underscoring the reality of ethnic dissensions in Poland, that he tells one of the company’s hammier principals (Lionel Atwill), “What you are I wouldn’t eat.” It may be, looking again at this sequence, that I should withdraw my earlier remark about “comparatively harmless”: In this movie, there is no safe ground. That’s precisely the source of both its exhilaration and its daring.
The second category of joke, concentrated largely on the marital relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Tura, has to do with adultery. Which, since they’re actors, is entwined with their egomania. Jokes in one category flow naturally into the other. When Maria, railing at her husband’s insistence on always taking center stage, says, “If we had a baby, you’d want to be the mother.” To which Tura, in Benny’s familiarly downcast dry tone, replies, “I’m satisfied to be the father.” The absurdity of the setup must have distracted the Hays Office from the punchline’s darker implications. Here we are again in a familiar area of comedy, but the reality of wartime will test this mode of humor to its fullest. (The absurd joke, about the husband wanting to be the mother, also had a topical echo: Jokes that implied a lack of “maleness” were a standard part of Benny’s ineffectual-nice-guy comic persona, and his last film before To Be or Not to Be had been a reworking of Charley’s Aunt, for large segments of which he appeared in drag.)
The advent of the young, handsome Polish Air Force officer, Lieutenant Sobinski (Robert Stack), allows the two categories of joke to merge. Maria tells him to come to her dressing room when he hears the words “To be or not to be,” which mean that her husband will be onstage for a long while. (Lubitsch carefully leaves untouched the implied joke that the young lieutenant apparently knows nothing about Hamlet.) As a result, her extramarital flirtation feeds directly into every leading actor’s worst nightmare: the fear that his acting is so bad audiences will walk out on him reciting the great soliloquy at the center of the world’s greatest play. Benny’s urban middle-classness, with its utter disconnection from the realm of passions embodied in Shakespeare’s verse, is made more hilarious by the implied contrast between his unimposing physical presence and the tall, powerful figure of Stack in his Air Force uniform. Lubitsch makes a point of emphasizing the latter’s height as he stands up in the audience to walk out. (The point will be reemphasized in the later scene where Benny returns home to find Stack asleep in what is presumably the Turas’ marital bed.)
Another cunning move by Lubitsch and his screenwriter, Edwin Justus Mayer, guarantees that the adultery joke, such a well-worn staple of high comedy, will never become simplistic. Tura’s insufficiencies as a husband are balanced by Lieutenant Sobinski’s overinsistence as a lover; before they have barely had more than one assignation, the young flier informs Maria that she will divorce Tura, marry him, and give up the theater. It’s only the outbreak of war—there’s irony for you—that saves her from this awkward personal situation. Lubitsch clearly understands that people other than actors can also let their egos carry them away.
And that’s why, when the film’s actual Nazis come upon the scene, we can feel that Lubitsch has to some extent validated their similarity to comic-opera Nazis. He perceives the entire totalitarian military operation as a gigantic indulgence of the male ego, without compunction and on an international scale: The highest-ranking official gets to enjoy the black-market foodstuffs and the favors of pretty Mrs. Tura. Or at least, so they think. Which is where the actor-ego and adultery jokes begin their unnerving interaction with the death jokes. Because the Nazis, buffoonish as they seem, have life-and-death power over their underlings and the conquered Poles. Their commander (Sig Ruman), who’s enchanted to learn that the people call him “concentration camp Erhardt,” would clearly not hesitate to send anyone who rubbed him the wrong way to one of those outposts where “we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping.” The full horror of the Holocaust was still largely unknown when the film was made, but Hitler had made no secret of his intentions, and what had been happening in Eastern Europe would not have been lost on a keen-eyed observer like Lubitsch. No, this isn’t entirely funny. It wasn’t entirely funny in 1942 and it isn’t today. It has a fluffy, funny surface and a lethal dark abyss at its center.
That’s the disquieting magic of To Be or Not to Be’s humor. From its paradoxical juxtaposition of the absurd and the horrifying, we get a mode of comedy that lets us confront the most vicious destructiveness human beings can wreak, while still laughing at human fallibility—and while still admiring human bravery and resourcefulness. Suicide notes and the assassination of traitors are funny. Corpses are an opportunity for sight gags. The actor Greenberg’s yearning to play Shylock becomes, in an unexpected context, both a farcical diversion and a risky, heroic act of near-martyrdom. And the two main non-horrifying jokes—the one about Joseph Tura’s ego and the one about other men’s craving for his beautiful wife—rise to meet the movie’s anti-totalitarian politics in what amounts to a matched pair of gigantic laughs.
The first of these is the line that, in 1942, produced the greatest wave of indignation against the film, deeply distressing Lubitsch. I hate giving away this brilliantly outrageous stroke, so if you’ve never seen the movie, stop reading here and come back when you’ve seen it, as the elegant structure of the joke is worth explaining. It’s a three-step joke: In each of his disguises, Tura finds himself being asked about Maria, and tries to use the occasion to work in a plug for his own fame: “And, by the way, she is the wife of that great Polish actor, Joseph Tura.” The first two times, the person he addresses replies, “Never heard of him.” The third time, while disguised as the double agent Siletsky, Tura is addressing Colonel Erhardt, and after mentioning his own name says glumly, “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him.” To his delight, Erhardt says that he had seen Tura play Hamlet in Warsaw before the war. Tura’s eyes light up as he waits eagerly to hear Erhardt’s opinion. And Erhardt says, “What he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland.”
The indignation of 1942 at this remark came largely from the fact that the war, at that time, was still a new phenomenon to Americans. Europeans, who had been fighting it since the fall of 1939, could only nod in rueful agreement with its truth. In later decades, its outrageousness has only made it funnier. The first time I saw the film, in the mid-1970s, the laughter was so loud I was afraid the roof might come off the theater. (And it might have; this was at the Thalia on 95th Street and Broadway, a rickety old building with a leaky roof, long since replaced by the Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia.)
The way Benny plays this moment of deepest humiliation is a lesson in his method as well as in Lubitsch’s. He does not react. We have seen Tura lose his self-control, even in moments where doing so would endanger him, when Maria is the topic. But here, where the defeat of his actor’s pride is total, he does nothing and says nothing. He simply walks toward the door, only his unhappy eyes conveying that he always knew this was the hideous truth, that he has been expecting and dreading this most feared moment all his life. He makes no attempt either to defend himself from the moment or to play past it; he simply lets it come. It is a small masterstroke of film-star acting, completely within Benny’s established performing persona while never stepping outside the role. That he has the door as a goal shows Lubitsch’s mastery. Doors were important to him. (Mary Pickford, who first brought Lubitsch to the U.S. to direct, fumed that he was “a director of doors.”) We don’t fully notice Benny’s non-reaction because we also want to see where he’s going and whether he’ll get there. As it happens—this is Lubitsch, after all—there is someone else on the other side of the door, and before the moment of Tura’s letdown has fully registered, we’re off on a new farcical phase of the story.
And the culmination of that farce is, one might say, the payback for Colonel Erhardt’s denigration of Tura. It doesn’t come from Tura himself but from fate, or human (male) fallibility: Erhardt can’t resist, even with Hitler making a short-notice visit to Warsaw, taking advantage of the clamor to pay a call on the charming Mrs. Tura. Rescue comes—I won’t spoil this one—in a most unexpected manner, which neatly tops all the previous adultery jokes, links back to the mock newsreel at the very start of the film, and simultaneously terminates Erhardt’s future with the “thousand-year Reich,” all in one lovely gem of a comic moment. Breathtaking.
Lubitsch was a curious case. He made eight or 10 masterpieces, including this one. He always trespassed on seriousness but rarely stepped outside of the comic or musical-comic genres (and when he did so step, he sometimes landed in bathos). He had a gift for elevating writers whose work away from him is less than enthralling, like his favorite, the not-so-great Broadway playwright Samson Raphaelson, with whom he worked on eight films. Justus Mayer, for whom this was the first of two Lubitsch films (a heart attack kept Lubitsch from doing more than supervise on the second one, A Royal Scandal), was an unlikely candidate for teaming with Lubitsch. His spotty track record included two so-so Broadway productions, both swashbuckling period romances, The Firebrand (1924) and Children of Darkness (1930). The former was filmed (as The Affairs of Cellini, 1934) and later made into a Kurt Weill–Ira Gershwin musical (The Firebrand of Florence, 1945), for which Justus Mayer provided the book. The latter, spun off from Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, has only the distinction that George C. Scott met Colleen Dewhurst during rehearsals for its one off-Broadway revival. Justus Mayer certainly isn’t the person you’d expect to find writing in 1942 about Nazis and mittel-European actors. But Lubitsch was a meticulous planner, and the screenplay sparkles.
The strength, and the precision, of Lubitsch’s vision can be seen in To Be or Not To Be’s subsequent history as a “property” by which many other hands have been tempted. Mel Brooks produced a version of it, starring himself and his wife Anne Bancroft as their version of the star couple, in 1983, with Alan Johnson directing. Not painful, the film has several funny sequences, in Brooks’ usual free-for-all style. It is most often affectionately remembered for the improbable early moment in which Brooks and Bancroft sing “Sweet Georgia Brown” in Polish. But it lacks both Lubitsch’s constructive skill and the intense depth of his sensibility, so that it quickly fades from memory. Even less memorable was a British-born stage version that the Manhattan Theatre Club inexplicably produced on Broadway briefly in 2008, a classic example of the what-were-they-thinking syndrome. Neither cast any shadow over Lubitsch’s reputation.
In a variety of ways, Lubitsch had dared before. One of his best silent films is Lady Windermere’s Fan—yes, a silent film of an Oscar Wilde play, and with relatively few intertitles; the camera and the set decoration deliver the visual equivalent of Wilde’s epigrams. Lubitsch had dared in the witty Trouble in Paradise (script by Raphaelson) by having the utterly adorable hero and heroine (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins) be a totally corrupt pair of criminals. (Paramount never reissued the film because, after the Production Code came in, the reshooting the censors demanded would have erased all hope of profit.) He dared by breaking the fourth wall in One Hour With You, having Maurice Chevalier address the camera, thus turning his continental charm directly on the audience. And in Ninotchka, with a very good script by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, he had crept up to the edge of the political daring unleashed at full strength in To Be or Not to Be, playing a witty game of chicken with the era’s other great totalitarian power, Stalin’s Russia. (It even contains a dramatized joke on the classic revolutionary slogan “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”)
Yes, the edge was where Lubitsch loved to play. It’s striking that this man, this slapstick comedian-turned-director, who had made his name largely by turning out upper-crust escapist frivolity flecked with irony, held a fundamentally somber view of humanity. He could easily have moved beyond the high comedy and fluffy musical genres, but he rarely tried to do so. His two great silent historical spectacles, both made fairly early in his German career, focus on high-fashion women caught up in nation-changing mass events: Madame Dubarry and Anne Boleyn. His authoritative handling of the crowd scenes proves that, if he had had the grandiose dreams of a D.W. Griffith, he could easily have triumphed in that realm. But he clearly didn’t wish to do so, and his subsequent departures from the genres he specialized in were rare. The wide-ranging dramatic sense he had inherited from his theatrical mentor, Reinhardt, found its home in his sensibility by burrowing underneath and subverting his innate lightheartedness. Perhaps this is what gives even the funniest of his movies a certain melancholy air. Comedy, according to the old truism, is tragedy with which we don’t identify. Lubitsch shares our failure to do so, but his innate compassion always supplies it with a touch of sadness. We, like the characters he makes us laugh at, have disappointed him. He makes us laugh because he knows that, deep down, the world is no laughing matter.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers:
Preston Sturges’ ‘The Palm Beach Story’
Charles Laughton’s ‘The Night of the Hunter’
Clarence Brown’s ‘Intruder in the Dust’
Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘Love Me Tonight’
