To Be or Not to Be (1942)

So, a Polish acting company are busy putting on “Hamlet” whilst the Nazis are preparing something altogether more menacing across the border. “Joseph” (Jack Benny) and wife “Maria” (Carole Lombard) are the stars of the show, and she has no shortage of admirers including an air force officer “Sobieski” (Robert Stack) who bravely decamps to the UK following the invasion to join the RAF. Rather foolishly, as it turns out, the enthusiastic young “Sobieski” confides some highly confidential information about the resistance to fellow citizen “Prof. Siletski” (Stanley Ridges) who is about to return home to Poland. No sooner has he left than they discover he is really a Gestapo spy and is now equipped with a list of those resistance fighters working in Warsaw. The only way they can think of to retrieve the list (and it’s duplicate) is for him to return and for the troupe to capture the unsuspecting traitor by pretending to be just about everyone from his handler to the Austrian corporal himself. Can they obtain the document and get themselves back to Blighty or are they all going to end up against a wall? This is an entertainingly paced drama, laced with comedy and even a little from the bard himself as Benny plays multiple roles and Lombard has a go at stabilising the plot as the glamorous counter-spy. Along the way this pokes fun at the eccentricities of the espionage industry, suggests an amiable degree of stupid pomposity amongst the conquerors - especially Sig Ruman’s goose-stepping “Col. Ehrhardt” and you have to keep your wits about you else you might lose track of just who’s beard is real or stick-on. I can imagine this sailed quite close to the wind in 1942, but for me it’s the kind of black humour that ridicules successfully their nemesis whilst simultaneously and comedically exposing their brutal excesses. Ernst Lubitsch, like the theatrical characters themselves, offers us a frequently quite wittily written and engaging ensemble effort that both Benny and Lombard hold together well, it has some precision timing and it’s well worth a gander.