#51 - To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)

Though released months after the bombings at Pearl Harbor pushed the United States out of isolationism for good, To Be or Not to Be was in development before the U.S. military was directly involved in World War II. This puts the dark comedy about Hitler's invasion of Poland in the company of early '40s Nazi awareness films like Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm and Powell & Pressburger's The 49th Parallel.

The film follows a troupe of actors led by husband and wife team Joseph and Maria Turas (Jack Benny and Carole Lombard) in Warsaw attempting to put on a satirical play about Hitler. The impending invasion by the real Hitler causes the players to scrap the Nazi parody and put on a production of Hamlet. When a Nazi professor comes to town, the actors scramble to stay one foot ahead of him and the Gestapo in order to escape to England.

Absolutely no one in classic Hollywood did innuendoes and double-entendres as well as Lubitsch, and this film certainly holds up in that category to pre-Code treasures like Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living. Lombard and Robert Stack's backstage flirting about his ability to "drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes" (he's a bomber!) has to be heard to be believed. The infidelity subplot between Lombard's Maria Turas and Stack's Lt. Sobinski is for the most part a nuisance distracting from the main plot, but the lightness Lubitsch plays this subplot for is interesting; in a domestic drama this would be the thing that brings down a household, but the Gestapo is on its way and infideilty is considered frivolous in the face of life and death.

Benny is wonderful (the look on his face before giving the "to be or not to be" soliloquy is priceless) and Lombard is totally gorgeous if underutilized. Not my #1 Lubitsch (if you haven't seen Trouble in Paradise DO IT NOW!) but one of the great Hollywood comedies with a social conscious.

New #100: Shane (#241)