To Be or Not to Be (1942)'s comments

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idjutt

'Heil myself!'

'Shall we drink to a blitzkrieg?'

'What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland.'

'Lieutenant, this is the first time I've ever met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes.'

2 years 2 months ago

Siskoid

If To Be or Not to Be feels so ballsy, it's because it is. It's lighter to be sure, but it's essentially Ernst Lubitsch's The Great Dictator, in which he manages to balance his brand of witty comedy and the Nazi invasion of Poland. Bumbling Nazis at times, but still murderous ones, and Lubitsch makes us smile at jokes about concentration camps and shenanigans with a corpse, while also showing us a devastated, #notajoke, Warsaw. You can definitely see how it inspired Mel Brooks down the line (who would star in a 1983 remake). It couldn't do very well in 1942, released two months after Carole Lombard's death (while on a tour promoting war bonds), but with the benefit of distance, it's become an enjoyable comedy of errors in which a theater troop tries to keep a spy from passing information to the Gestapo by dressing up as Nazis and so forth. It's got a fun Mission Impossible vibe, but where the mission is put in jeopardy by artistic egos and a man's jealousy for his wife's admirers. We perhaps don't get enough of Jack Benny's Hamlet, but it still gives us the title. Appropriately, The Merchant of Venice is also important.

3 years ago