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

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BillieDove

Funny little thing, but not Lubitsch's best - I don't see how it earned its place as the, what, 73rd most important movie of all time according to more than 2000 people?

12 years 8 months ago

daisyaday

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi647863321/

12 years 6 months ago

contrafugal

You can't have your cake and shoot it, too.

12 years 8 months ago

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.

4 years 1 month ago

boulderman

An air raid siren and the first evening of war? The accents were a shame. Watching it again tonight, rank it 10/10 but this observations and the cut from Gestapo to Hamlet seemed sudden.

5 years 3 months ago

rabsi1

I honestly thought Sobinski was the villain of the film at first because of how creepy he was.

Very funny film overall! 8/10

8 years 2 months ago

Dieguito

The best Lubitsch

12 years 8 months ago

boulderman

10/10 best film I've seen this year :)

12 years 6 months ago

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.'

3 years 3 months ago