To Be Or Not To Be *****

On the 100th anniversary of her birth, one has to round off proceedings today with a review of her last and greatest film…

by Allan Fish

(USA 1942 99m) DVD1/2 (France only)

A laugh is nothing to be sneezed at

p  Alexander Korda, Ernst Lubitsch  d  Ernst Lubitsch  w  Edwin Justus Meyer  story  Ernst Lubitsch, Melchior Lengyel  ph  Rudolph Maté  ed  Dorothy Spencer  m  Werner Heymann, Miklós Rózsa  art  Vincent Korda

Jack Benny (Joseph Tura), Carole Lombard (Maria Tura), Robert Stack (Lt.Stanislav Sobinski), Stanley Ridges (Prof.Alexander Siletski), Felix Bressart (Greenberg), Sig Ruman (Col.Erhardt), Tom Dugan (Bronski), Lionel Atwill (Rawitch), Charles Halton (Dobosh), Henry Victor (Capt.Schultz), Maude Eburne (Anna),

Ernst Lubitsch’s satirical swipe at Hitler was accused of bad taste at the time of its release, and one can perhaps understand why.  What isn’t quite so easy to comprehend is why certain critics didn’t see the propaganda value in making your enemy look ridiculous.  And this is exactly what they do with Herr Hitler in this truly wonderful laugh riot.  From the opening blast of Chopin over the credits to the final running gag reducing the leading actor to shock in more ways than one, Lubitsch doesn’t take a false step.  It was all the more welcome a sight considering his previous film was that awful second collaboration with Garbo Two-Faced Woman that saw her retire and Lubitsch leave MGM.  In wartime exile Alexander Korda he had the perfect partner in crime, but no-one, not even Lubitsch, could have expected it to turn out quite so good.  Mel Brooks, who directed the 1983 remake, should hang his head in shame. 

Joseph Tura and his wife Maria are the most distinguished acting couple in Warsaw in 1939, playing Shakespeare and comedy alike with suitable aplomb (though not without a little ham).  However, when their satire of the Nazis is banned by the government censor they feel betrayed, if not half so betrayed as when the Nazis invade Poland.  Then, with their whole country in peril, it is up to the Turas to use their acting ability for real in a daring attempt to halt Nazi persecution in Poland.

Coming in the midst of Lubitsch’s later golden period (after Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner and before the nostalgia piece Heaven Can Wait), this is a true Lubitsch masterpiece.  Everything about the film works, even today, when its propaganda aspects could have dated it.  It was one of the few Lubitsch classics not scripted by his great partner Samson Raphaelson but it lost nothing for that as Meyer’s work is exemplary, with more than enough memorable situations and lines to give the most morose of film buffs a happy.  He’s undoubtedly further helped behind the scenes by the musical contributions of Rózsa and Heymann, with clever incorporation of Polish anthems (you come out humming Chopin’s ‘Polonaise Militaire’).  Rudolph Maté’s photography and Vincent Korda’s sets are also to their accustomed superb standard (the latter getting in practise for the battered interiors and ruins of post-war Vienna in The Third Man), but there is no doubt that it is in the casting that Lubitsch really came up trumps.  Though often a self-satisfied movie presence, Benny is magnificent here as the egotistical but paranoid Tura, especially brilliant in his impersonations of Nazi sympathisers.  “That great, great actor Joseph Tura, you must have heard of him?” he asks Ruman.  “Ah, yes” Ruman replies knowingly, “what he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland.”  Lombard, that queen of screwball comedy (see Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey and Nothing Sacred) is magnificent, too, in her last role (which she said was her best just before her fatal plane crash), memorably flirting with Ridges’ Nazi agent.  “Shall we drink to a blitzkrieg?” he asks her.  “I prefer a slow encirclement” she aptly replies.  Laurels too to the rest of the cast; Atwill’s deliriously hammy actor, Lubitsch’s own Bressart as the spear carrier with a desire to play Shylock, the never better Dugan as the Hitler impersonator, Ridges as the Nazi, Henry Victor as the much put-upon Schultz and, best of all, the immortal Sig Ruman as “Concentration Camp” Erhardt who can’t even shoot himself without calling out to his orderly.  Lubitsch knew, like Sturges’ John L.Sullivan, that there’s a lot to be said for making people laugh, especially this loud.  Altogether now, “Schultz!“