TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942) *** Made quite some time before its release, apparently the government found it too hardcore anti-Nazi, and so threw things into neutral until it was sure. Oh, yeah, sure, by '41 it wasn't obvious. It was to Ernst Lubitsch & co., anyway, and they are downright devastating. It's too honest to be propaganda, and Lubitsch focuses on the mindless (and therefore vulnerable to satire) Prussian conformity in subservience to authority, rather than the horrifying, and obvious anyway, consequences (as he did in a similar, but also accurate and unique, vein with Soviet subservience in Ninotchka). It's also, not incidentally, a Jack Benny comedy. So they're trying to do way too much, far more than mere mortals can carry, all at the same time. And pulling it all off beautifully. Spy thriller, romance, comedy, theatrical satire, political cartoon... It works for a lot of reasons, not least Lubitsch' treatment of the time-honoured Jewish tradition of making your burden lighter by making light of it. The dynamic and nearly telepathic timing between Benny and Carole Lombard doesn't hurt either, and guys like Felix Bressart and Charles Halton are somehow able to develop characters by merely standing in the corner of a frame. The main reason the film works, though, is because everyone so obviously believes in it. They aren't making fun of Nazis because they're being paid to, and they're not making jokes about Der Führer just because he's ludicrous and an easy target. They're making fun of entire philosophical constructs and social behavioral models. Of course, the fact that such things are dismissed so effortlessly, with a glance or a one-liner, doesn't make them any less dangerous or appealing to those base or stupid enough to find them appealing in the first place. Where's Ernst Lubitsch when you need him? He's in here, it's an eternal call to arms.
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