To be or not to be you tube9/5/2023 (Lengyel had previously appeared in the credits of Lubitsch’s Forbidden Paradise, Angel, and Ninotchka.) It is hard to say how much the story matters here, since everything depends on the manner of the telling. The story line of To Be or Not to Be is attributed to Lubitsch’s old acquaintance Melchior Lengyel, one of those Hungarians whose dramaturgical contraptions the director found so indispensable as a point of departure for his own inventions. The fear is real, and even though each emerging danger is deflected by the most ingenious comic solution, another danger soon enough takes its place. But at every step, it keeps plainly in view-just offscreen, and detectable even in the comic buffoonishness of Sig Ruman’s Colonel Ehrhardt-the possibility of real terror, real soul-destroying cruelty, real suffering. For many, myself included, it is close to being the funniest film ever made, featuring Carole Lombard in her last and greatest performance (she would be killed in a plane crash before the movie opened) and Jack Benny in the only film role that did justice to his comic genius. But To Be or Not to Be did something rare, then or at any time, by interweaving farce and disaster in such a rigorously structured fashion as to elicit, in the very same scenes, genuine anxiety and a hilarity so acute that it has something like an ecstatic kick. If only the film had been a bit more sentimental, the jokes might have gotten by comic relief was something understood and accepted, and indeed was to become the bane of many a wartime melodrama. The ever-astute Bosley Crowther of the New York Times intoned: “Frankly, this corner is unable even remotely to comprehend the humor.” It is not surprising that a good many critics and viewers at the time found the movie tasteless and inappropriate. Jack Benny against the Nazis? A farce set in occupied Warsaw? Jokes about concentration camps? The Gestapo itself foiled by an elegant web of implausibilities? The victory that he permitted his creatures was the victory of art over life, and it was possible only as long as he did not compromise his own art in the least. Nowhere did this realness become more apparent than in To Be or Not to Be (1942), where for once he dared to pit the inhabitants of his world, living on wishful reverie and theatrical sleight of hand, against forces of real destruction. The illusion was acknowledged to be an illusion by the characters themselves, and that acknowledgment made it real. He had made a world of elegant illusions, of luxuries and pleasures savored by being transformed into metaphorical wit (the “Lubitsch touch”)-a parallel place that, at any time, might well be the place where one would rather be-but there was nothing flimsy or casual about it. She had recently seen a screening of Angel (1937), and as we began to discuss the film in detail, and as memories of other Lubitsch films came welling up, I began to feel a gratitude to Lubitsch that was profound and personal, as if the emotional qualities he had embodied in his art possessed, even in mere recollection, the sort of healing power more commonly associated with the tombs of saints. The occasion was a dinner in Paris, at the home of a French poet and his Italian wife and it was through her graceful stewarding of the conversation that it turned away from the events of the day-and the unavoidable mood of shock, grief, anxiety, and disorientation-toward, of all things, Lubitsch. I had never fully gauged how much I associated the films of Ernst Lubitsch with the very notion of civilization until an evening in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11.
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