DVD of the Week: “To Be or Not to Be”

As mild as the Hollywood response to the Third Reich may have been in the days and years before the Second World War, two movies stand out for their uninhibited comic ferocity: Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be,” which I discuss in this clip (and which Criterion is releasing today). Although Lubitsch’s film came out in 1942, he began filming in November, 1941—a month before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The feeling of living in the shadow of impending war and experiencing its outbreak is built into the story, which begins in Warsaw in August, 1939, on the eve of the German invasion of Poland. But the movie is a comedy, centered on a theatre troupe that is about to perform an anti-Nazi play when the Nazis actually arrive. The actors then find that their skill at impersonating Nazis will be of great use to the Polish underground resistance. Shakespeare is at the heart of the story. The troupe’s lead actor (Jack Benny) fancies himself a great Hamlet, which is where the movie gets its title (which the wily director turns into a ribald joke); there’s a subplot involving the troupe’s Jewish actor, Greenberg (the great character actor Felix Bressart), and his lifelong dream of playing Shylock; and then there’s a sort of play-within-the-film, a grand and daring impersonation that nudges at a moment in “Hamlet.” There, the play is meant to “catch the conscience of the king,” but here, the king in question has no conscience, and, in effect, must be caught by direct action. As a result, the troupe must act out moral obscenities in order to help the cause. Jack Benny, a famous Jewish actor, has to play a colonel in charge of concentration-camp deportations, and it’s a shock that he turns into a riot.