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To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: 7 Nov 2013 09:36:00
To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

To Be or Not to Be (1942)
DVD9 + DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:39:03 | 10,7 Gb
Audio: English AC3 1.0 @ 384 Kbps | Subtitles: English SDH
Genre: Comedy, War | The Criterion Collection #670

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

As nervy as it is hilarious, this screwball masterpiece from Ernst Lubitsch stars Jack Benny and, in her final screen appearance, Carole Lombard as husband-and-wife thespians in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who become caught up in a dangerous spy plot. To Be or Not to Be is a Hollywood film of the boldest black humor, which went into production soon after the U.S. entered World War II. Lubitsch manages to brilliantly balance political satire, romance, slapstick, and urgent wartime suspense in a comic high-wire act that has never been equaled.

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To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

Ernst Lubitsch’s suspenseful screwball thriller To Be or Not to Be was one of the first openly anti-Nazi films to be produced in Hollywood, and while it was not well received during its initial theatrical run because many thought it tasteless in “exploiting” Nazi-occupied Poland, it has since come to be recognized as one of the great classical comedies and quite possibly Lubitsch’s masterpiece (in his book Hollywood Bedlam, William K. Everson asserts “If this book had to limit itself to only ten screwball classics, then To Be or Not to Be would certainly be one of them”). That it was misunderstood at the time is not surprising, given that it was a daring foray into using black comedy as a means of sending up the Nazi threat without underestimating just how deep their menace runs. The fact that film was made at all is all the more impressive given that, in the previous decade, the studios had largely played nice with the Third Reich, toning down or halting production on any films that might be considered anti-German for fear of losing those markets (if one accepts the thesis in historian Ben Urwand’s controversial new book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler, the studios did much more than simply kowtow to Hitler’s regime).

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

Like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), To Be or Not to Be was produced independently, in this case by British producer Alexander Korda, and distributed by United Artists. The complex story, penned by prolific screenwriter and sometimes playwright Edwin Justus Mayer from an original story by an uncredited Lubitsch and his regular collaborator Melchior Lengyel, involves a troupe of actors in Warsaw who become involved in a spy plot after the Nazis take control of Poland. The two main characters are Joseph and Maria Tura (Jack Benny and Carole Lombard), married thespians with matching egos whose love for each other is threatened at various points by both personal and professional jealousy. Maria is pursued intensely by Lt. Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack), a young, handsome Polish pilot who goes to see her every night and slips into her dressing room while Joseph is delivering Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (the recurring gag of Stack getting up and leaving as soon as Benny utters the line “To be or not to be” is a brilliant moment of both physical and emotional comedy as Joseph is offended that anyone dare walk out during his great performance when he should be incensed that the man is going to see his wife backstage). Of course, there are no real shenanigans going on, as Maria remains faithful and committed to Joseph even as she entertains the young man’s attention to feed her own ego (it’s amusing that Joseph and Maria’s egos are being fed simultaneously, his on-stage and hers backstage).

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

The Turas and the other actors in their troupe get involved in thwarting a spy named Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) from relaying information about the Polish Resistance to the Nazi authorities. This involves an increasingly complex series of masquerades and subterfuges. Maria must pretend to be interested in Siletsky both romantically and politically in agreeing to his invitation for her to become a Nazi spy. Meanwhile, Joseph must first pretend to be a Nazi commander named Colonel Ehrhardt in an attempt to convince Siletsky that he has relayed the information to the Gestapo and later pretend to be Siletsky himself in meeting with the actual Colonel Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman), a comical blowhard who relishes the idea that he is known in Polish circles as “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt,” but lives in constant fear of offending the Fuhrer with his comical asides. His repeated, agitated cry of “Schultz!” to pass blame down to his second-in-command every time he screws up (which is often) is one of the movie’s most amusing verbal refrains.

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

Perhaps what is most impressive about To Be or Not to Be is the way it navigates the tricky balancing act between screwball comedy and wartime suspense (Lubitsch referred to the film as “a tragical farce or a farcical tragedy”). Lubitsch, a German expatriate who had settled comfortably into Hollywood in the early ’30s and was best known for his sophisticated romantic comedies like Trouble in Paradise (1932), proved to have just as deft a touch in generating suspense as he had in generating laughs. The movie is replete with one-liners and double-takes (most of the comedy is verbal and interpersonal, rather than directly physical), but it also abandons comedy for long stretches and becomes the kind of straight-up suspense thriller you might associate at the time with Fritz Lang. Granted, the suspense is punctuated now and again with verbal and visual gags, but it never comes at the expense of narrative tension. One of the film’s best sequences finds Joseph impersonating Siletsky and walking into a potential trap because Colonel Ehrhardt has discovered that the real Siletsky has been killed. Joseph, in full make-up and false beard, finds himself locked in a room with Siletsky’s corpse while Ehrhardt and the other Nazi commanders wait outside to see his response. His escape plan is brilliantly and hilariously executed—right up until the point when his fellow actors show up and inadvertently sabotage it.

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

The idea of actors making great spies has its own built-in amusement, especially since their plans are constantly threatened by their perceived need to play up their roles and get more attention (Lubitsch, who had started his career as an actor in the silent era, clearly enjoys jabbing at the profession and the egos that often go with it). The film works largely because of the sublime performances by the impressive cast, starting with Benny, who was making the transition from radio to film, and Lombard, who was tragically killed in a plane crash just before the film’s release, making it her last on-screen appearance. Stack is appropriately earnest as the lovestruck pilot, and he and Benny have a fantastic square-off when Joseph finds him sleeping in his bed (it’s not what you think).

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

The most memorable character, though, is arguably Sig Ruman’s blustery Colonel Ehrhardt, who is both the movie’s chief villain and its primary comic foil. Watching him humiliated again and again is gratifying on an ideological level, but it also has an oddly humanizing effect, to the point that we almost feel sorry for him by the end when the acting troupe has tricked him yet again and is beating a hasty exit from the country. It is not surprising that audiences at the time didn’t fully appreciate the film’s witty sense of danger, but in hindsight it is not hard to recognize it as one of Lubitsch’s greatest works and one of the most inventive anti-Nazi films to emerge from Hollywood.
QNetwork
To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection #670]

Special Features:
DISC ONE (6,38 Gb):
- New, restored digital film transfer
- New audio commentary featuring film historian David Kalat

DISC TWO (4,27 Gb):
- Pinkus’s Shoe Palace, a 1916 German silent short directed by and starring Ernst Lubitsch, with a new piano score by Donald Sosin (53:07)
- Lubitsch le patron, a 2010 French documentary on the director’s career (44:51)
- Two episodes of The Screen Guild Theater, a radio anthology series: Variety (1940, 29:30), starring Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, and Lubitsch, and To Be or Not to Be (1942, 25:40), an adaptation of the film, starring William Powell, Diana Lewis, and Sig Ruman

Many Thanks to Original uploader.

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