Tonight I watched another classic Screwball Comedy from director Ernst Lubitsch : "To Be Or Not To Be" (1942), starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. You may recall that I became a fan of Lubitsch after seeing his "Trouble In Paradise" a couple of months ago. That one starred Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins, and I was so impressed with how streamlined everything was, from the editing to the dialogue, to the motion of the actors, that I put a Lubitsch Bookmark in the back of my mind so that I would remember to look for more of his films, which flow like water. This afternoon I was at Northridge Libe returning some dvds, and I happened to see "To Be Or Not To Be" on the shelf. I knew the title, it's a famous movie and this release of it is on Criterion, and it also had the extra serendipitous bonus of having a Shakespearean title, just as we are in the midst of Shakespearemania.
So I had to check it out, and it was note perfect. Benny and Lombard play husband and wife acting team Joseph and Maria Tura, stars of the Polish stage. They have an acting troupe in Warsaw, and they are about to stage a farce about Nazism, called "The Gestapo". The only trouble is that the time is August 1939. WW2 starts on September 1st, when Hitler's troops storm into Poland. The actors have to tear down their promotional placards for "The Gestapo" before the real Gestapo sees them.
They do this successfully, and to keep their theater open under Nazi occupation, they stage Shakespeare's "Hamlet" instead, with Jack Benny in the lead role. Those of us old enough to remember Jack Benny can imagine him as Hamlet, right? Also, he is supposed to be a Polish stage actor, but he talks like Jack Benny, and it must have been a Lubitsch decision to have everyone in the cast speak in their natural American voices even though they are all supposed to be Polish or German, and it works because it adds to the comedy.
Lubitsch plays the Nazis as buffoons, and in this respect you can see where Mel Brooks got his humor for "The Producers" and a lot of his other styles as well. Robert Stack plays an All-American Bomber Pilot who just happens to be Polish. He is infatuated with Carole Lombard as "Maria Tura". He has seen all of her plays and read all of her magazine articles, and he is at every performance of the Turas' current production of "Hamlet". Stack doesn't care that she is married, and sneaks backstage to profess his love for her while her husband Jack Benny is hamming up the Hamlet soliloquy that begins with "To be, or not to be....".
Onstage, Benny notices the same tall, uniformed soldier walking out of the theater every time he begins Hamlet's famous speech, and he starts to suspect that something fishy is going on.
But this romantic triangle is only one aspect of the plot, and it is stashed away after 30 minutes or so because the Nazis are closing in and there are more pressing matters at hand.
As the local Gestapo leader becomes aware of Maria Tura, he wants to romance her himself, in order to convince her to become a Nazi spy.
The film plays as well as a thriller as it does as a comedy, and as was the case with our other recent Ernst Lubitsch movie "Trouble In Paradise", "To Be Or Not To Be" is seamless from start to finish. Every scene leads right into the next, no wasted words or edits, and the main thing about the "Lubitsch Touch", as it was called, is that he was an expert at knowing the visual and spacial geometries of filming a scene, and editing it, and knowing how it would look onscreen to a viewer, and so he knew down to a science just how to have his actors enter a room, or just how to move their shoulders, or adjust their stride. The human physical movement is a major part of the liquid flow of his films, as his actors arrive at their marks and deliver their expertly written lines with comic precision.
It looks effortless when you watch it, but when you stop and think about how such a movie was made, you realise that Lubitsch was a perfectionist. That's why his movies play as they do.
Carole Lombard was a well established star by the time she made "To Be Or Not To Be". She was a leading comedienne who would later on influence ladies like Lucille Ball and others. She had a celebrated romance and marriage to Clark Gable, who was coming off of the biggest box-office movie of all time, "Gone With The Wind". They had moved into a small ranch property in Encino here in the Valley.
Early in 1942, shortly after "To Be Or Not To Be" was completed, but before it was released in theaters, Carole Lombard and her mother were returning from a trip to Las Vegas, where they had been promoting the sale of war bonds. After takeoff to return home to Los Angeles, their plane crashed somewhere along the route and all onboard were killed.
Carole Lombard was 33. "To Be Or Not To Be" was her last film, and it is a five star classic.
Two huge thumbs up.
See you in the morning in church. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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