To Be or Not to Be Directed by Ernst Lubitsch Starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" on PBS: Beats going to the theater with a bag over your head Now Showing New video releases for Nov. 3 R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Life Is Beautiful Reviewed by Charles Taylor Roberto Benigni's comic fable about one family's struggle to survive in a Nazi concentration camp is in offensively poor taste (10/30/98) John Carpenter's Vampires Reviewed by Laura Miller Another nail in the coffin of a once-great director's career (10/30/98) "I wanted to make a beautiful movie" By Erika Milvy "Life Is Beautiful" director Roberto Benigni talks about the Holocaust, Charlie Chaplin and how he was haunted by the idea of a happy man in a Nazi concentration camp (10/30/98) Happiness Reviewed by Jonathan Lethem Todd Solondz's harrowing comedy unearths the violence and desperation in suburban life (10/23/98) Pleasantville Reviewed by Charles Taylor Director Gary Ross fetishizes the '50s in this high-concept parable about the dangers of conformity (10/23/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

--------------[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ]___ Ernst Lubitsch's legendary comedy stirred controversy by pitting vain Polish actors against buffoonish Nazi killers. Prisoner being interrogated: "How do you make a Nazi cross?" Nazi interrogator: "I don't know. How do you make a Nazi cross?" Prisoner: "Tread on his corns." [Stomps on the Nazi's foot.] Nazi: "Zat's not funny!!" --Monty Python sketch But of course, it is funny. Terribly funny. Comedy encourages our natural disrespect for authority. It targets formality, stiffness, those foolish enough to think that what they're doing is very, very important. Nazis will always be irresistible comic targets because they're all of those things -- and it doesn't hurt that they speak in funny accents. What they did ... well, that's as far from funny as you can get. Roberto Benigni's much-praised new film "Life Is Beautiful" -- a comedy whose last hour is set in a concentration camp -- is so horrendous because Benigni fails to see that a heartwarming comic fable is obscenely irrelevant to the fact of the camps. If there were any justice, Benigni would be getting the shellacking that Ernst Lubitsch did in 1942 when he released "To Be or Not to Be." Lubitsch, to be sure, walked a very fine line. This farce, set just before and just after the 1939 invasion of Poland, is about a Warsaw theater company that becomes entangled with the Nazis, and it makes all sorts of tasteless jokes. In the most notorious sequence, Jack Benny, who has disguised himself as a Nazi officer (nicknamed "Concentration Camp" Erhardt) so he can intercept information about the Polish underground, boasts, "We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping." Critics who were in thrall to "the Lubitsch touch," the light, glancing sophistication he brought to pictures like "Trouble in Paradise" and "The Shop Around the Corner," were appalled by the coarseness of much of the film's humor. But Lubitsch knew that, given his subject, good taste would have been the worst possible taste of all. To those with their back against the wall, culture can seem a flossy irrelevancy. "To Be or Not to Be" presents us with one of the most preposterous images ever of high culture: Jack Benny in doublet, hose and wavy blond wig, as Hamlet. Benny plays "that great, great Polish actor Joseph Tura," the star of the troupe and a born ham, essaying the role of the Melancholy Dane. Emerging from his dressing room in costume, he grabs a backstage phone and says, "This is Mr. Tura. Could you please send me a salami and cheese sandwich and a glass of beer?" And from that moment on, culture and refinement don't stand a chance -- except when they connect back to life instead of being a diversion from it. One member of the troupe (Felix Bressart) dreams of playing Shylock, but in production after production, he's a spear carrier. He gets his chance, though -- before the toughest audience imaginable, a gaggle of Gestapo officers whom he favors with Shylock's famous soliloquy, "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" Art imitates life throughout "To Be or Not to Be," and life has the good manners to return the favor. At the beginning, the troupe is rehearsing an anti-Nazi propaganda play. Lubitsch includes a brilliant and daring joke on the vanity of actors when Carole Lombard -- who plays Joseph's wife and leading lady, Maria -- makes her first entrance in a slinky silk gown and announces that she thinks it would make a great impression in the concentration-camp scene. "Think of me being flogged in the darkness," she says. "I scream and suddenly the lights go down and the audience discovers me on the floor in this gorgeous gown." Word comes that the Polish government has nervously canceled the performance. It's the first test the movie puts the actors through. They'll get to make their anti-Nazi statement, all right, just not within the self-contained world of the theater (where they would only be preaching to the converted) but in the real world where their performances must be flawlessly convincing. Later, Tura will impersonate Colonel Erhardt to retrieve a list of members of the Polish underground from the double agent Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), and then impersonate Siletsky to pass on phony names to the real Erhardt. The head Nazi in "To Be or Not to Be," the real Colonel Erhardt (played by the wonderful Sig Ruman), is a comic buffoon. So plump that he looks like he's bursting out of his own skin and with a big walrus mustache and a Katzenjammer Kids accent, he's a walking, talking sight gag. Erhardt is an immensely likable guy, jovial and hearty and fated to get himself in one pickle after another. Welcoming a visiting dignitary, he can't help but tell a "very funny story" that's going around Warsaw. "They made a brandy out of Napoleon and a herring out of Bismarck," he says, "and Hitler will end up as a piece of cheese!" He's so delighted by the gag that it's out of his mouth before he realizes his mistake. His loyalty now in question, Erhardt can only sputter and extricate himself with a hasty, fervent "Heil, Hitler!" Anyone who's ever made an indiscreet remark would be heartless not to identify with him. But he's a Nazi, too, and Lubitsch doesn't try to hide that. Erhardt isn't just some harmless Colonel Klink (when we first see him he's giving orders to arrest resistance members -- and we know what that means) or the melodramatic villain typified by Conrad Veidt's Major Strasser in "Casablanca," all hissing consonants with cigarette clutched between two fingers. Erhardt is first and foremost a comic figure, but not one whose menace has been nullified. A movie where the monsters are human was a good deal more complex than Hollywood's typical wartime fare, but that alone doesn't account for the discomfort this movie caused. There were plenty of reasons not to find it funny. Between the time it was made -- in late 1941 -- and the time it was released -- in March of 1942 -- America had entered the war and the Nazi push looked all but unstoppable. The first time we see Benny, he's dressed as a Gestapo officer giving the Nazi salute. It turns out he's rehearsing a play, but we're not told this at first, and the sight is profoundly unsettling. You can imagine audiences in 1942 wondering if this is what the world would look like in few years, with everything familiar and dear given an unspeakable new visage. And there was something else, too. Three weeks after finishing the film, Carole Lombard was killed in a plane crash while on a bond drive. The movie mixes so many genres -- farce, spy thriller, melodrama, propaganda picture -- that it's often confusing. Perhaps Lubitsch, whose greatest films seem so effortlessly perfect, was too caught up in his feelings about the war to smooth out his movie. He'd certainly had a taste of Nazi callousness. Lubitsch had been a famous actor in his native Germany, and a cruel caricature of his squat, hawk-nosed profile had illustrated a Nazi propaganda poster on how to recognize a Jew. (Nor should we forget the birth name of this movie's star -- Benjamin Kubelsky.) "To Be or Not to Be" is no longer shocking, as it was in 1942. Fifty-six years later, for all its unevenness and perilous flirtations with sentiment, it's amazing. It took astounding courage for Lubitsch to change his accustomed style, and in the service of such risky material. Made at a moment when it would have been easy to give in to hopelessness and heavy-spirited exhortations about patriotic duty, or to take refuge in the comforting reduction of evil to the inhuman, "To Be or Not to Be" does neither. Its mixture of low vaudeville humor with an intricate comic structure seems now to convey the hope that it would be possible -- crucial -- to meet the horrors that lay ahead with something like a human face. SALON | Nov. 2, 1998 Charles Taylor's Home Movies video column appears every other Monday in Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available Nov. 3 ] Godzilla Les Miserables C O M I N G_S O O N [ New releases available Nov. 10 ] Artemisia I Went Down The Horse Whisperer Small Soldiers