Alan Johnson (1983)
Although the directing credit for this remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film went to Alan Johnson, it’s hard to believe that Mel Brooks, who also produced and stars, didn’t lend a hand. (Johnson is best known for his choreography in Brooks movies such as The Producers and Young Frankenstein.) To Be or Not to Be is enjoyable but the warm feeling that you get watching it has more to do with the performers than with how good the film is. Brooks is the ‘world famous in Poland’ actor that Jack Benny played in the original movie although the character Joseph Tura has been renamed Frederick Bronski. (Bronski was a minor member of the theatre company in the Lubitsch version.) Anne Bancroft plays his wife, Anna. Brooks is entertainingly energetic in Bronski’s various roles and disguises although I recall Jack Benny’s characterisation of the vain, somewhat fatuous Tura as being sharper. Bancroft looks beautiful and is ready to be funny but you’re conscious of a gap between what she’s capable of doing and what the material she’s given allows her to do. This is equally true of others in the cast, notably José Ferrer (as the Nazi collaborator Professor Siletski), George Gaynes and Jack Riley (other members of the Bronskis’ theatre company). The screenplay, by Ronny Graham and Thomas Meehan, is firmly based on the one that Edwin Justus Mayer and Melchior Lengyel originally wrote but a large part of the strength of Lubitsch’s film is that it was made during World War II. Its making fun of Nazis gave the first To Be or Not to Be a daring edge that couldn’t be replicated forty years on.
Mel Brooks has said in interview that deriding Hitler has been a main part of his long comedy career – the best way, Brooks finds, of addressing his feelings about what the Nazis did to the Jews. Some of the notes struck in this version of To Be or Not to Be are jarring, however – particularly the newsreel footage of the German occupation of Poland and scenes involving Anna Bronski’s camp dresser, Sasha (James Haake), who goes out for the evening complaining that the pink triangle he has to wear ‘clashes with everything’. (Almost needless to say, this character wasn’t in the original film.) When the Nazis start arresting the local homosexuals, Sasha takes refuge in drag in the ‘Ladies’ number performed by Bronski and some of the girls in the company – but the Germans arrive on stage and haul him off. Alan Johnson stages this almost as straight drama; since Sasha has been presented as a cartoon queen until this point, you feel confused – and that the director is too.
By far the most satisfying performance in the film comes from Charles Durning as the Nazi officer Colonel Erhardt: To Be or Not to Be is worth seeing just for the way he tries and fails (twice) to perch suavely on his desk. Erhardt is more often on the verge of hysterical anger: Charles Durning builds up a head of comic steam and Christopher Lloyd, as Erhardt’s subordinate, is funny too when he’s part of their double act. As the Polish air pilot who has a crush on Anna and heads for her dressing room each time her husband launches into his ‘highlights from Hamlet’ routine and the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, Tim Matheson has a callow ardency that’s very likeable. It’s odd, given the reputation of the Lubitsch film, that part of the appeal of this remake lies in its somewhat effortful enthusiasm – in the unflagging conviction the players bring to even the dimmest jokes. You know there must be a good bad reason for the stage manager (Ronny Graham) being called Sondheim: plenty of people will guess (not that I did) that it’s to allow Bronski to instruct him in due course to send in the clowns. The opening number – Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft singing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ in Polish – is by far the film’s best although the curtain call that the cast members take during the closing credits is agreeably apt: they’ve worked hard enough to deserve applause.
11 June 2015