A Bubbly Mix of Zaniness and Doom

A Bubbly Mix of Zaniness and Doom
By David Propson

"Pointless." "Dish-water dull." "Makes no sense at all." Those are among the nicer things the critics said about the current Broadway adaptation of Ernst Lubitsch's classic 1942 film "To Be or Not to Be."

It would be tragic, however, if audiences mistook this misbegotten production as any reflection of Lubitsch's sublime comedy. Recreating Lubitsch's bubbly cocktail of zaniness and doom is a tall order: Even Mel Brooks missed the mark with his 1982 film remake. But the Broadway version travesties Lubitsch's original, altering characters and even changing the famous ending.

So skip the play -- but rent the film.

Lubitsch's "To Be or Not to Be" at first purports to tell "How Adolf Hitler Came to Warsaw in August 1938." In its opening shots, we see a familiar, miniature-mustached figure peering self-satisfiedly into picturesque Polish storefronts. Later we watch him march into a Gestapo office. A flurry of arms spring forward, along with a chorus of "Heil Hitler." He raises a fey salute, and croaks: "Heil Myself."
It's a good gag -- one that nails the ludicrousness of any cult of personality. But things are rarely what they seem in this elegantly absurd film. The camera pulls back to reveal that these "soldiers" are simply actors on a stage. We are, indeed, in Poland. It is August 1939. But German forces haven't yet crossed the border. When they do, a few days later, the storefronts will be smashed, the buildings toppled, the theater closed.

The whiplash contrasts between light-footed farce and the grim reality of occupation make the original film one of the funniest pieces of propaganda ever.

"To Be or Not to Be" is one of those rare films in which nearly every line is meant to be funny. Jack Benny digs into the role of Joseph Tura, the biggest ham actor in Poland, as if it were the part of a lifetime -- and for Benny, primarily a radio and TV star, it was. Carole Lombard is a perfect contrast as his leading lady -- equally funny even though she never seems obviously to be going for a laugh.

The film was a box-office bomb, in part because Lombard died in an airplane crash before the film was released. But wartime audiences also didn't know what to make of a film so lighthearted about the depredations of war. "Shall we drink to a blitzkrieg?" says one smooth-talking Nazi, attempting to seduce Lombard. "I prefer a slow encirclement," she responds. Another character goes by the jolly nickname "Concentration Camp Earhardt." He delivers his verdict on Tura's acting: "What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland."

Lubitsch's film can dance on the precipice of bad taste precisely because the director had what was called, at the time, "The Lubitsch Touch": His pictures were graced with an elegant, allusive tone that could capture human foibles while simultaneously forgiving them.

In "To Be or Not to Be," Lubitsch was after fearless farce. The plot defies easy summary, but it turns on a series of scenes in which Tura and his fellow actors, in order to save the Polish underground, impersonate Nazi officers of increasing importance -- culminating with an impersonation of Hitler himself.

At the start of the film, the Turas are the leading husband-and-wife actors in Warsaw. One night, as Tura performs his "fabled" Hamlet, Maria plans a tryst with a young Polish flyboy, played by Robert Stack. Then, each evening, her lover leaves the theater and heads to Maria's dressing room just as Joseph begins his "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy. The cuckolded Joseph takes these repeated walk-outs as an affront to his acting, not his manhood -- the first of the film's many running jokes.

Benny makes his character the very opposite of deep -- he's the classic stage archetype of every vain husband ever cheated on by his wife. Such figures are the same the world over, Lubitsch is saying, and essentially harmless. Though the film's supposed Poles all speak with broad American accents, the director's love for the embattled culture of Mitteleuropa is as clear in "To Be or Not to Be" as it is in "The Shop Around the Corner."

And it turns out Tura has something deeper in him. When Stack's Lt. Sobinski shows up with an urgent message for the underground, Tura sets aside jealousy to come to the aid of his country. His patriotism -- and his vanity -- eventually spur him to risk his own neck.

The film's bold gambit is to not only maintain but accelerate the comic action in the scenes that follow the invasion. The Nazi forces are rapidly assimilated into the farce, playing a role as old as Roman comedy -- feckless authority figures, ripe to be duped. At its base, Lubitsch's joke is pretty simple -- the Nazis themselves are the real imposters.

Yet he makes some serious points about life under occupation. The Gestapo men feast on caviar while the Poles starve. They are keen to exploit their power sexually, making passes at Maria under the guise of recruiting her as a spy. ("Naturally it sounds exciting," she coos. "But what are we going to about my conscience?")

Lubitsch puts his finger on bullying as the basic emotional truth of occupation. Tura -- who truly is an awful actor -- gets the hang of imitating a Nazi only when he finds his inner bully. He then starts pushing around the befuddled occupiers themselves, providing the film's most cathartic comic kicks.

Lubitsch has such a light touch that the serious subtext skates by quickly. But Felix Bressart's spear-carrier obliquely introduces one important theme when he tells a scene-stealing fellow actor: "What you are, I would not eat." The Jewish Lubitsch, born in Berlin, was concerned about Nazi anti-Semitism long before war broke out.

Though the film never once uses the word "Jew," the status of Jews under Nazism is repeatedly alluded to. Indeed, it could hardly be more clearly addressed than in the film's climactic scene, where the troupe conspires to create a distraction at a Nazi Party gathering. While his fellow actor impersonates Hitler, Bressart "plays" a troublemaking Jew who assaults him by reciting Shylock's "Rialto" speech ("If you prick us, do we not bleed?/If you tickle us, do we not laugh?")

The scene inevitably calls to mind Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," in which a Jewish barber is mistaken for the Führer. Rising to address a rally, he instead appeals to its sense of shared humanity -- really Chaplin speaking directly to the audience. Lubitsch would never do something so clumsy. Shakespeare's words deliver the lesson more elegantly.

So, is it OK to laugh at the Nazis? Even today, the humor of "To Be or Not to Be" can still feel incongruous. If the Nazi occupiers were as venal as Lubitsch's parodies, they were hardly so toothless. Yet Lubitsch might retort that if it seems wrong to tell a comic tale in the context of a vile regime, that is an indictment of the regime -- not the tale.

Not for the only time, Lubitsch has put the relevant words in the mouth of Bressart: "A laugh," he notes at one point, "is nothing to sneeze at."