In his long career, Mel Brooks has made many parodies of different movies and genres, but he only has one remake on his resume, and that would be his take on the 1942 comedy To Be or Not To Be. A co-worker has a movie quote per day calendar and a line attributed to To Be or Not To Be on it, and I asked him if he knew which one. He didn’t know, but since he gives what he feels are appropriate quotes to coworkers, he handed me the page and told me to keep it despite the fact I already had one.
My other gift quote was “That’s not how the Force works!”
Anyway, I found the 1942 version on Hulu, so here we are.
Originally a flop upon release, To Be or Not To Be came out in 1942, but was filmed before the United States entered World War II. Likewise, it was the last movie for comedic leading lady Carole Lombard before she died in a plane crash at the age of 33. Director Ernst Lubitsch came to the United States from Germany, and he had some rather strong opinions on the Nazis. It shows in this movie.
The plot concerns a troop of Polish theater actors. Lead actor Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) is an overly sensitive thespian who loses it when he sees a man repeatedly leave when he’s playing Hamlet. Said man is a pilot in the Polish military named Sobinski (a young Robert Stack), and Sobinski is smitten with Joseph’s wife and leading lady Maria (Lombard). She humored him at first but has no intentions of leaving her husband. However, his general obliviousness to how Poland’s biggest actress really feels about him does lead him to realize that a professor offering to deliver messages to the Polish Underground for Sobinski and his fellow Polish exiles comes in handy. The professor is a spy for the Gestapo, and he’s sure to take all the names he’s been given, including Maria’s, to his superiors. Since Maria is inadvertently wrapped up in all this, that means her whole troop, especially Joseph, will need to use all their acting skills to get the names before the Gestapo does and then get the heck out of Poland. It’s a good thing they got a guy who looks a lot like Hitler…
On the surface, this is a very pleasant comedy of manners with a lot of clever word play. Benny plays the easily-upset actor very well, and Lombard is a charming screen presence. But one thing that stands out is how much this movie says about the Nazis that other movies wouldn’t. Even a movie like Casablanca only speaks of Nazi evil in the vaguest of terms. This one makes direct references to the Gestapo, concentration camps, and heavily implies it’s bad for Jews. Since the U.S. wasn’t even in the war at the time the movie was made, that’s rather impressive that a movie like this would take such blatant sides as thing one does. Yes, the Nazis are made to look ridiculous–it is still a comedy–but the comedy is grounded in real world evil. It’s rather impressive any movie in 1942 would have been so direct. Most of the time, Nazis are just evil invaders. Here, we see the results of what they do after they take over.
I really liked this one. I should probably see Mel Brooks’s version at some point and see how well the two stack up.
Grade: B+
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