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While Ernst Lubitsch’s black comedy To Be or Not to Be is considered a classic, it was initially controversial. Released during World War II, its depiction of the Nazis as a group of corrupt clowns raised concerns about trivializing the war and its underlying causes, even though this was before knowledge about Nazism’s deepest horrors was widely spread. In light of what was revealed at the conclusion of the war, the film’s bad taste is even more striking and questionable, although of course the filmmakers could not have had foreknowledge of the regime’s worst atrocities.
Over time, it became easier to accept the film’s image of Nazis as cowards, lechers, toadies and fools and praise the film’s daring. When I first saw To Be with a college audience in the 1970s, for example, our uproarious response suggested that no one took the material seriously as political or historical evaluation. It seemed, rather, a surprisingly sophisticated comedy of outrage, sort of a Dr. Strangelovski that dared to make jokes out of concentration camps and other material that no thinking person could find funny.
Even more time casts the film in yet another light. The facile cynicism of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era has itself been historicized as the complacency of a cultural elite ready to see a joke in anything. Lubitsch’s well-known psychological and cinematic sophistication gives some cover, but the film’s broad humor was not what made his reputation, and for all the filmmaking craft, some of To Be’s jokes are off-putting in light of subsequent realities. Contemporary Ukrainians, for example, would no doubt find the film’s destruction of Warsaw too uncomfortably similar to their own reality to accept brutal invaders as very funny.
In true farce fashion, the plot mechanics are complex and implausible. A troupe of Polish actors led by Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) and his wife Maria (Carole Lombard) help ex-patriate airman Lieutenant Sobinski (Robert Stack) foil Nazi agent Professor Siletski (Stanley Ridges) in his plans to hand over a list of resistance fighters to the Gestapo. Much confused bustling back-and-forth rounds out the conceit that the Nazis are themselves a bunch of bad actors whose conventional behavior and gaudy theatrics can easily be impersonated by people who do it for a living. Because they take themselves seriously, the Nazis come off as idiots.
You do not have to be an historian or political scientist to know that there was more to Nazism than bumbling theatricality. Nor are moralists alone in recognizing the dangers of turning political repression, torture, legalized murder and genocide into humor decor. In light of the past thirty or forty years, it is not as easy to laugh with Benny and company as when I first saw To Be or Not to Be, though viewed purely as craft, it remains immensely entertaining. Perhaps that is the film’s most powerful lesson. Laugh at tyranny, but never forget it can happen again.