151: To Be Or Not To Be

US 99m Dir: Ernst Lubitsch  Key Cast: Carole Lombard and Jack Benny

When JoJo Rabbit was released in 2019 there were many who found it distasteful and couldn't understand how you could possibly make a comedy about the Nazis. It's always amazing that things don't change very much because people were saying very similar things about To Be or Not to Be, which also lampooned the Nazi's and this was released during the Second World War. 

The film opens with what initially appears to be Hitler wandering around Warsaw but turns out to be a group of actors rehearsing a play about the Nazi's, including ham actor Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) and his wife Maria (Carole Lombard). The government ask the group not to perform the play for fear of upsetting the Nazi's but not long later they invade Poland. The actors realise they are uniquely positioned to use their skills to impersonate Nazi's and aid the resistance. 

I thought this was really funny and it made me laugh out loud quite a few times. It's satire has two main focuses. One is on the Nazi's and their ideology and the film really makes them look stupid. There's a sense in the world of this film, which probably has an element of truth to reality, that most of the Nazi's were utterly terrified of their superiors. This is most often manifested by the fact whenever any make the slightest transgression in the film they quickly say "Heil Hitler" as if blind faith will cover their mistakes. 

It also satirises actors, who always remain actors no matter how dangerous the scenario. Probably the main source of comedy in the film is the way the actors, especially Joseph Tura, attempt to improvise, having to deal with whatever the Nazi's they are 'performing' alongside spring at them. Joseph's improvisation skills are somewhat lacking and he keeps repeating the same point, though amusingly it later turns out that the person he is impersonating does exactly the same thing. 

The tone of the film feels pitch perfect. The comedy is derived from the Nazi's and the actors rather than the situation itself. The tone is kept understandably light but it's very clear just how awful things are in Warsaw and just how dangerous what the actor's are doing is. I think this adds a different feeling when watching- normally in a farcical comedy you want the protagonist to slip up because it will be funny but here you really don't want to happen because the outcome would be tragic. It touches on anti-Semitism with one actor, implied to be Jewish, gets to deliver the famous Shylock speech from The Merchant of Venice. If this was made now I'd want it to dive deeper into the dark stuff but context is key and it makes sense that during the war itself it's touched upon but isn't focused on too much. 

All in all I thought this was superb dark comedy with fantastic dialogue delivered perfectly by the two excellent leads. Sadly Carole Lombard never got to see the film be released as she died in a plane crash a month before it's release. This was perhaps the best performance of her tragically short career.