Ernst Lubitsch (1942)
In Trevor Griffiths’s play Comedians, Eddie Waters, the teacher of a stand-up comedy evening class, recalls touring with ENSA in Germany and visiting Buchenwald shortly after the end of the War – ‘They’d cleaned it up, it was like a museum’. That same evening, Eddie fails to laugh at a Jewish gag in the ENSA show, having ‘discovered … there were no jokes left. Every joke was a little pellet, a … final solution’. He tells all this (and more) to Gethin Price, the comedic subversive in the night class. Gethin drily replies that ‘A German joke is no laughing matter’. Comedians was first staged in 1975 – about halfway in time between the release of Mel Brooks’s The Producers and the first series of the BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo! Arguments still persist as to whether and, if so, how the Nazis can be a legitimate comic subject, as recently illustrated in the very different reactions to Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit.
Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be stands out in the Nazi comedy canon because of when it was made. Set in contemporary Warsaw, the film was released just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and before the turning of the World War II tide. Hollywood had been producing anti-Nazi dramas since before the outbreak of the war in Europe (Confessions of a Nazi Spy appeared in May 1939) but what Carole Lombard’s biographer Larry Swindell terms ‘Nazified slapstick’ was more novel. To Be or Not to Be wasn’t a popular hit and the critical response was mixed. Even the individual response was mixed in the case of Manny Farber. Reviewing Lubitsch’s film in March 1942, Farber described it as ‘mildly amusing’. Six months later, he wrote that ‘With appalling thick-skin, the movie To Be or Not to Be facetiously thought that Nazi-dominated and cholera-ridden Poland was a world of laughs’. It’s as if Farber took a little time to digest quite what he’d seen.
The screenwriters Melchior Lengyel and Edwin Justus Mayer, Lubitsch (whose script contribution is uncredited) and Jack Benny, the male lead, were all Jewish; but they were also either American-born or, with the qualified exception of Lengyel[1], had emigrated to America before the Nazis came to power. They were at a safe enough distance to stand accused of tasteless travesty of what the Germans were doing to Poland. For a twenty-first-century audience, the setting and set-up are startling – so is some of the dialogue. The plot involves the self-styled ‘great, great Polish actor’ Joseph Tura (Benny) having to impersonate a Gestapo colonel called Ehrhardt, known as ‘Concentration Camp Ehrhardt’, and to improvise his lines, which include ‘Yes, we do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping’. Present-day viewers can’t, even so, see To Be or Not to Be for what it originally was. Reception of the film now is liable to be filtered through the experience of post-war Nazi comedies. Manny Farber’s reactions remind you that in 1942 To Be or Not to Be was, whether or not you could find it funny, extraordinary. I do find it funny but it seems only right to acknowledge how distance in time can lend enchantment to the view.
This was the second time I’d watched the film. The first (about fifteen years ago, since when I’ve also caught up with the 1983 remake[2]) was the only time I’d seen Carole Lombard prior to this month’s BFI retrospective of her work. To Be or Not to Be was the only one of the four films I’ve watched her in this January that I’ve consistently enjoyed (excellent as My Man Godfrey is at the start). This was her last picture (she died, aged thirty-three, in a plane crash the month before it opened); her role, in terms of screen time and good lines, is a supporting one; and perhaps her admirers don’t see it as quintessential Lombard. I found her, as Joseph Tura’s glamorous wife Maria, much more supplied and modulated than in the other three pictures, and liked her better. In most of her scenes, Lombard wears a satin gown (designed by Irene) that does seem typically her.
Robert Stack is strikingly handsome and agreeable as the young Polish aircraft pilot who’s mad for Maria and makes his way to her dressing room each time Joseph embarks on Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy but the older men in the cast, playing either members of the Tura company or Nazi officers, are the heart of the film and Jack Benny is the star of the show. Benny’s trademark mincing walk and effete deadpan as he pauses to deliver the title line are a fine complement to Joseph Tura’s histrionic zest in his exchanges with Maria and his impressions of Ehrhardt and the Polish traitor Siletsky. (In his Hamlet wig, Benny wears an expression that anticipates Alec Guinness in one or two of his Kind Hearts and Coronets incarnations.) He launches into ‘To be or not to be’ repeatedly but the repetition makes it increasingly funny, up to and including the final delivery. (By now, the boots that Benny’s Hamlet wears over his tights are above thigh-high.)
Making fun of the Nazis as if to disempower them was a controversial but comically inspired tactic. At the start of proceedings, just before the German invasion of Poland, Tura and his troupe are rehearsing a play satirising the Gestapo. The Polish government orders them to call off the production to avoid inflaming the political situation but the parts the actors have been preparing come in handy as the film’s plot thickens. The company, dominated by hams, pretend to be Nazi officers. The actual Nazis come across as ham actors too: the exemplary highlight of this is a confrontation between the real Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman) and the actor Rawich (Lionel Atwill), a congenital milker of whatever he does on stage. The supposed Hitler lookalike (Tom Dugan) is a company member called Bronski, the name of the protagonist played by Mel Brooks in the remake of To Be or Not to Be.
Throughout the plot convolutions, Lubitsch always keeps you aware of the theatrical egotism and vanity that propel much of the action (and which is far more dynamic here than in Twentieth Century). Using such an actual, ongoing matter-of-life-and-death situation to ensure narrative urgency may be in questionable taste but it’s effective: it makes sense of the frequently manic playing. Cutting from a scene of farce to an air raid on Warsaw sounds even harder to justify yet it’s possible to see the juxtaposition as a reminder from Lubitsch of the reality of the dire situation from which his remarkable comedy takes off .
20 January 2020
[1] The Hungarian Lengyel didn’t actually settle in America until 1937 but he’d spent time there (and in London) during the 1920s.
[2] The remake is largely faithful to Lubitsch’s plot. The main innovation in the Alan Johnson version, which is also its queasiest element, is the subplot involving the gay dresser.
