To Be Or Not To Be (1942)

To Be Or Not To Be (1942) is not a film noir but as it is a theatreland mistaken identity German occupation of Poland romantic satire black comedy caper about the Holocaust, Nazism and Adolf Hitler and as such it is destined to feature on the classic film noir website, and though with little pedigree, wenn es überhaupt etwas ist, dann ist es kein Film Noir!

A comedy and as comedy does not age well of all the products and causes of the works of Hollywood, and of the few directors of the era that have no feet nor fingertips in film noir, Ernst Lubistch has no feet nor fingertips, non in film noir non, none.

An endless matinée, a film that works to eternity, one of the Hitler films and hard to conceive of in light of how magnificent it must be to portray the fascist in film, and there is film noir style, because if the shooting and the price of black and white, relax there is very little.

It has long been a commonplace to remark that Jewishness remained an absent presence in American cinema of the early 1940s. And yet in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) we encounter something like a paradox of representation: the film “never mentions Jews directly,” as critics routinely note, and yet it is saturated with Jewishness at every level of its semiotic economy. 

“. . . We’re in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. It’s August 1939. Europe is still at peace. At the moment, life in Warsaw is going on as normally as ever. But suddenly something seems to have happened. Are those Poles seeing a ghost? Why does this car suddenly stop? Everybody seems to be staring in one direction. People seem to be frightened, even terrified. Some flabbergasted. Can it be true? It must be true, no doubt. The man with the little moustache, Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler in Warsaw when the two countries are still at peace and all by himself? He seems strangely unconcerned by all the excitement he’s causing. [. . .] How did he get here? What happened? Well, it all started in the general headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin.”

In fact, it may be the only Hollywood film of its moment to give both a Jewish face and a Jewish voice, Felix Bressart’s Greenberg, the opportunity to pronounce words that articulate the situation of European Jews, even if under the protective disguise of Shakespeare. The paradox of presence and disappearance, of simultaneous articulation and silencing, is constitutive of the film’s historical, aesthetic, and philosophical significance. 

As I have remarked elsewhere, « je soutiens que le silence articulé vaut parfois plus qu’un cri impuissant ».

From the very beginning, Lubitsch stages Jewishness as both central and marginal. Chaplin’s Jewish-coded Tramp in The Great Dictator (1940) was an allegory of ethnicity without an explicit anchor, a floating signifier of immigrant strangeness. Bressart, by contrast, was not allegorical but stubbornly concrete.

Born in East Prussia, carrying a mild accent, his soft and rueful face was legible as Jewish in a way that no allegory could obscure. He speaks fewer than twenty lines in the entire film, yet, as the contemporary viewer soon realizes, he is everywhere. 

He is present at Poland’s collapse, at Poland’s resistance, and, finally, absent in the closing scene. His disappearance is as loud as his words, an erasure that shouts. « Je remarque que l’absence, dans le cinéma, résonne comme une parole insistante ».

Lubitsch’s decision to make Greenberg both central and ephemeral must be read against the backdrop of Hollywood’s aversion to Jewish representation. Production Code conventions suppressed explicit ethnic specificity. Lubitsch, however, perfected the art of circumvention. As James Harvey notes, he mastered the psychology of the “noncom”—the studio artisan who could not openly defy power but who could mock it from within. 

The funniest film about Hitler was ever To Be Or Not To Be (1942)

The cinematic object known as Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942) positions itself at the uneasy crossroads of political catastrophe and theatrical repetition. It is a film wherein specters reign: the specter of Hitler, the specter of Shakespeare, and above all, the specter of repetition itself. It is a film in which, as I often say to myself, “la comédie est le tombeau de la tragédie, mais aussi sa résurrection différée”. The oscillation between presence and absence becomes its structuring principle, the logic by which the film achieves both laughter and despair.

The opening scene, set on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland, already proclaims itself as a mise-en-scène of haunting. An actor playing Hitler is seen idling on the streets of Warsaw. The effect is profoundly uncanny, for this “Hitler” is no Hitler at all, but a simulacrum. The Warsaw citizenry encounters him as a ghostly double, one both expected and radically untimely. 

As Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, “everything begins by the apparition of a specter, or more precisely by the waiting for this apparition.” What Lubitsch places before us, then, is the suspension between imminence and deferral. The specter appears only to displace itself, for it is not Hitler but Bronski, an actor rehearsing a likeness. 

Breaking Poland in To Be Or Not To Be (1942)

Thus, thus, thus, and nothing shall never be simple again, thus, thus, thus Hitler becomes the shadow of Bronski even as Bronski is measured against his own photograph. Representation folds into itself jah? As Derrida once more reminds us in Of Grammatology, “la représentation se mêle à ce qu’elle représente, jusqu’à ce que le représenté ne soit qu’une ombre du représentant”.

The film is organized through the recursive logic of the joke. Jokes about Hitler, jokes about Shakespeare, jokes that circulate and return, never quite identical to themselves. Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, reminds us that condensation, omission, and substitution are the primary techniques of both dreamwork and jokework. 

Lubitsch’s film stages these Freudian processes not only narratively but formally: it is a film that retells, represses, and recycles the same materials until they exhaust themselves into uncanny laughter.

The most famous example is, of course, the repeated interruption of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Lieutenant Sobinski rises from the audience at precisely this moment in order to rendezvous with Maria Tura. The joke, repeated four times, relies upon anticipation and deferral: we expect Hamlet’s profundity and instead are confronted with farce. 

The interruption is comic, yet its political implication is grave: Hamlet must not be completed, for to complete Hamlet would be to complete Gestapo, the suppressed play-within-the-film. Completion would mean death, and so the soliloquy is eternally deferred, condemned to spectral repetition. As I put it, “le rire est une interruption sacrée, empêchant la tragédie de s’accomplir”.

Similarly, the film introduces the notorious cheese joke: “They named a brandy after Napoleon, they made a herring out of Bismarck, and the Führer is going to end up a piece of cheese.” 

At first innocuous, it circulates, it is repeated by Nazis themselves, and eventually it is implicated in the death of a Polish resistor who is executed for telling “outrageous, supposed-to-be funny stories” about Hitler. What begins as levity becomes lethal. The joke does not remain stable; it accumulates new resonances with each telling, a Freudian repetition compulsion that insists upon its own return.

The film juxtaposes two embedded plays: Hamlet and the fictional Gestapo. Gestapo is censored by the Polish government as too dangerous, and replaced with Hamlet, ostensibly harmless in its canonical prestige. Yet Hamlet proves equally subversive. 

Its concern with usurpation, espionage, and regicide resonates with Warsaw under occupation. The play covers over Gestapo, but traces remain. Posters for Hamlet incompletely conceal posters for Gestapo, rehearsal schedules for the banned play linger chalked on boards. Thus, repression paradoxically preserves what it seeks to erase.

The censorship of Gestapo parallels the repression of Jewishness in the film. Greenberg, whose desire to play Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is repeatedly deferred, eventually performs Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech to the Nazis themselves. 

Yet he does so with the crucial omission of the word “Jew,” replacing it with “I” or “we.” This displacement foregrounds absence, inviting the audience to complete the speech silently in their imagination. Freud’s dictum applies: what is omitted has been replaced by inference, which then returns us to what has been omitted. Thus, Greenberg’s Jewishness exists spectrally, never uttered yet insistently present. As I remark in French, “l’absence du mot est la présence du spectre”.

Lubitsch’s film, though not an adaptation of Shakespeare in any conventional sense, operates as what Maurizio Calbi calls spectro-textuality. Shakespeare hovers between presence and absence, invoked in fragments, citations, jokes, and omissions. The effect is a haunting, a Shakespeare always present but never entirely there.

Wish that To Be Or Not To Be (1942) was a film noir!

Greenberg becomes the condensation point of this spectral Shakespeare. His recitation of Shylock, offstage and at risk of death, is both comedy and tragedy. He is Yorick and Shylock, clown and memento mori, fellow of infinite jest and sacrificial lamb. He is not allowed to arrive in England with the other actors; he disappears, a spectral absence that mirrors the historical absence of millions. The missing word “Jew” in his speech becomes the missing figure of the Jew in the diegesis.

Thus, Greenberg embodies the film’s obsession with acting as survival. Acting is no longer confined to the stage; it permeates life itself. To survive under Nazi occupation is to act, to don masks, to simulate. The boundaries between theater and reality dissolve. As I have written elsewhere, “agir, c’est survivre; jouer, c’est être”.

Freud’s theory of the death drive lurks beneath the film’s comic surfaces. Repetition, substitution, and repression are not only comic devices but symptoms of a deeper compulsion toward death. Lubitsch’s refusal to allow tragedy to play itself out, his insistence on transforming both Hamlet and Gestapo into farce, must be read as both evasion and revelation. 

Tragedy is impossible in the moment of catastrophe. The Holocaust, as Slavoj Žižek insists, is unrepresentable. And so Lubitsch turns to comedy, not to trivialize, but to bear witness obliquely.

Comedy becomes the only possible mode, not because it relieves, but because it interrupts. The refusal to allow Hamlet to complete his soliloquy is the refusal to let tragedy culminate in annihilation. Yet the comedy is always inflected by death. Greenberg, the “angel of laughter,” is also the figure of disappearance, a living corpse. His jesting becomes his epitaph. The repetition of his Shylock speech insists that his absence will haunt the film even after it ends.

Thus, and OK it is not a film noir, but what discussion of the film output of 1942 could be made without this film, Okay, es ist kein Film noir, aber welche Diskussion über die Filmproduktion von 1942 könnte ohne diesen Film geführt werden? the film is still To Be or Not To Be is still relevant and functions as what Derrida would call a work of haunting. It is not an adaptation of Shakespeare but a conjuration, simultaneously invoking and exorcising the Bard. It does not portray Hitler but stages his ghostly doubles, his comic effigies. It does not openly speak of Jews but allows their absence to reverberate. In its repetitions, its interruptions, its jokes, it forces us to experience politics obliquely, spectrally.

In the final analysis, the film’s politics lie precisely in its refusal of directness. It is through comedy, substitution, and spectral Shakespeare that Lubitsch allows history to speak, not in its fullness, but in its uncanny repetitions. The film demonstrates, to borrow Derrida’s words, that the masterpiece is that which “authorizes each one of the translations, to make them possible and intelligible without ever being reducible to them.”

This was the Lubitsch touch: not only the smuggling of sexual innuendo past the censor but also the displacement of political critique into comedy. Comedy, here, is neither trivial nor evasive but the very possibility of speaking under repression. « Je dis que le comique, en se multipliant, déchire la censure ».

The paradox of Lubitsch’s position as an émigré is equally crucial. By 1942 he had been in America for two decades—no longer a refugee but never quite not European. His oeuvre remained rooted in a stylized Europe, populated by heiresses, barons, and cosmopolitan flâneurs, a fairy-tale continent of intrigue and masquerade. 

Yet precisely because Europe was collapsing under Nazi domination, Lubitsch’s dream-Europe was subversive: it insisted on play where history insisted on terror. « Je propose que le rêve, au cinéma, est une arme de désobéissance ».

At the same time, Lubitsch cultivated his Jewishness with ironic relish. Hitler is said to have displayed his face in Berlin as the archetypal Jew, an enemy image for the Reich. Lubitsch himself parodied that role in photographs—vulgar suit, slicked hair, oversized cigar—making theatrical use of precisely the caricatures the Nazis sought to weaponize. 

This deliberate embrace of the vulgar and the refined alike exemplifies the dialectic of his style: elegance that exposes itself as imposture, vulgarity that is proudly owned. « Je note que l’élégance n’est qu’un masque, et que le masque, parfois, est plus vrai que le visage ».

What is striking, then, is that between Lubitsch’s early silents and To Be or Not to Be (1942) almost no Jews appear explicitly. They are displaced into metaphors, comic accents, marginal figures. Bressart himself had already been positioned in earlier Lubitsch films as a figure of gentle moral clarity. 

In The Shop Around the Corner (1940), as the timid clerk Pirovich, he reminded his boss of forgotten tenderness. In Ninotchka (1939), as the minor Soviet bureaucrat Buljanoff, he whispered that memories could not be censored. Only in To Be or Not to Be (1942) is his Jewishness foregrounded, both comically and tragically, as the hinge of the narrative.

Greenberg’s repeated invocations of Shylock’s speech from The Merchant of Venice are the textual key to the film. Three times he cites or partially cites the famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” soliloquy. The first is almost comic, backstage, where the actor longs to play Shylock. The second is mournful, amid the ruins of Warsaw. 

The third, climactic, is defiant, hurled directly into the face of Bronski-as-Hitler. This trajectory mirrors the transformation of Jewishness in the European catastrophe: from marginal comic type, to victim of destruction, to figure of resistance. And yet, after this final speech, Greenberg disappears. The Jew, having spoken, vanishes. « Je conclus que le Juif, dans ce film, parle pour disparaître ».

The Shakespearean intertext cannot be underestimated. Greenberg insists that Shakespeare “must have thought of me” when writing Shylock. This ridiculous claim is also profound. To imagine that Shakespeare had Greenberg in mind is to imagine that the archetypal Jew is always-already contemporary, that Shylock’s situation anticipates the Warsaw ghetto. 

Shakespeare’s Christians, in their complacent cruelty, prefigure Europe’s respectably murderous citizens. The antisemitic stereotype is less important than the way it exposes Christian hypocrisy. Lubitsch knew, instinctively, that Hitler’s Europe depended not on madness alone but on the ordinariness of “respectable” Europeans. « Je soutiens que la banalité du mal précède toujours sa radicalité ».

This insight places Lubitsch unexpectedly close to Hannah Arendt’s later concept of the banality of evil. Colonel Ehrhardt, played with blustering charm by Sig Ruman, is not monstrous but banal: corrupt, cowardly, venal, terrified of superiors. His buffoonery anticipates Arendt’s Eichmann. The Nazi, Lubitsch shows, is not an otherworldly demon but a middle-echelon bureaucrat, both laughable and lethal. Comedy, in this context, becomes prophecy. « Je déclare que le rire prophétise la vérité que la philosophie tarde à dire ».

Lubitsch’s use of comedy scandalized contemporaries. Lines such as “So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt” were received as tasteless. But the tastelessness was the point. To joke was to reveal complicity. The laughter of the audience implicated them, as critics like Stephen Tifft later observed. 

The line “What he did to Shakespeare, we are doing now to Poland” is even more devastating: the equivalence between artistic desecration and political occupation reveals that culture and barbarism are not opposites but twins. The viewer who laughs shares in this exposure. « Je remarque que le rire, ici, est une confession involontaire ».

The love triangle between Joseph Tura (Jack Benny), Maria Tura (Carole Lombard), and Lieutenant Sobinski introduces another register of allegory. Benny’s Jewishness was widely legible, even when unspoken.

Lombard, by contrast, embodied the gentile blonde. Their marriage thus stages the fragile relation of Jews and Poles, Americans and Europeans, assimilation and difference. Maria’s infidelity, her pragmatism, her duplicity, signify not simply personal weakness but the instability of Polish-Jewish relations and, by extension, America’s unreliable embrace of Jews. Sobinski’s idealized vision of Poland as pure and noble is displaced by Maria’s cunning, just as assimilationist dreams are displaced by tragic realities.

Joseph Tura himself is the figure of the schlemiel, the bungling everyman who nevertheless survives. His transformation from self-absorbed actor to reluctant hero exemplifies what one might call the “Lubitsch Hamlet”: indecision, narcissism, and disguise converted into political utility. 

When he dons a Gestapo uniform, the Jew becomes the Nazi, survival through impersonation. Here, too, disguise is not frivolous but ontological: in the world of occupation, identity is only costume. « Je dis que l’identité, sous le fascisme, n’est qu’un vestiaire ».

The climax arrives when Greenberg, finally given the stage, delivers Shylock’s speech directly to Hitler. The scene is meticulously staged through camera movement: long shot, medium shot, close-up, over-the-shoulder. The Jew’s face fills the screen, flanked by stormtroopers. For a brief moment, cinema grants visibility to what history was extinguishing. 

The words of Shakespeare become the testimony of Warsaw. But immediately thereafter, Greenberg is led away by guards, struggling. He does not return. His absence at the celebratory ending in England is chilling. His story has been consumed by the comedy, his body erased. This is the “doubly vanished Jew”: erased from Europe, erased from Hollywood.

Lubitsch thus offers neither consolation nor triumph. He offers comedy, which is harsher. Comedy insists on contradiction, on the impossibility of resolution. Greenberg “plays Shylock” not on the Rialto but on the stage of catastrophe, and his disappearance insists that laughter is not safety but lucidity. The final joke—Sobinski watching another man follow Maria during Tura’s soliloquy—reminds us that infidelity and instability remain. There is no closure. « Je propose que la comédie est la vérité qui refuse la clôture ».

Seen in historical retrospect, the timing of the film is uncanny. While To Be or Not to Be (1942) was being completed, the Wannsee Conference was ratifying the Final Solution. Even as Lubitsch staged Greenberg’s defiance, Europe was enacting extermination. 

That the film could not know this does not diminish its prophetic quality. Rather, it demonstrates the power of comedy to intuit what history would later confirm. The simultaneity of production and destruction marks the film as an artifact of historical witness, even if its audience dismissed it as frivolous.

The legacy of the film is thus paradoxical. A commercial disappointment, it has become in hindsight one of the most profound cinematic meditations on Nazism. Unlike Casablanca (1942) or Mrs. Miniver (1942), it refuses the comfort of melodramatic heroism. Unlike Watch on the Rhine (1943), it refuses solemnity. 

It insists that the struggle against Nazism was not only external but internal, located in the laughter of the spectator who must confront complicity. « Je maintiens que le spectateur, en riant, se juge lui-même ».

Lubitsch’s gesture is, finally, an affirmation of the Jew as both presence and absence. Bressart’s Greenberg, with his “Semitic” nose and his soft voice, is at once caricature and hero, comic relief and tragic witness. 

Jack Benny’s Tura, with his assimilationist ambiguity, is both American everyman and Jewish schlemiel. Between them stretches the spectrum of Jewish visibility: from explicit to disguised, from immigrant to assimilated, from victim to survivor. Both disappear, but their absence speaks.

Thus the film’s title itself—to be or not to be—acquires its ultimate resonance. It is not only the question of Hamlet or of Poland. It is the question of the Jew in cinema, the Jew in Europe, the Jew in America. To be visible or to vanish, to speak or to be silenced, to laugh or to die. The film answers not with certainty but with comedy, which is to say, with the refusal of certainty.

As I have written, « je conclus que le simulacre, bien manié, est une arme froide et précise ». Lubitsch’s simulacra—actors as Nazis, Jews as Poles, Shylock as Greenberg—dismantle the aura of power. They remind us that tyranny thrives on solemnity and that laughter is the last refuge of clarity. In the vanished face of Greenberg, in the ludicrous dignity of Tura, we glimpse the profound truth that cinema, even in comedy, can bear witness to catastrophe.

The critical economy around Lubitsch remains curiously impoverished, a scarcity that persists despite admiring contributions by Weinberg, Harvey, and Eyman. I note their archival diligence, their attention to production milieux and reception climates, yet their analyses seldom consort with current inquiry into representation as simulation rather than mimesis.‎ 

I quote my old teacher, Agnew Destouches, « je maintiens que l’écart entre pratique et théorie n’est pas une simple lacune, c’est une méthode », and this method has seldom been applied to Lubitsch’s most disconcerting text. 

The deficit is most visible when critics rehearse the original polemics about the propriety of coupling farce with horror, a rehearsal that quietly reinscribes the inaugural misunderstanding. ‍‎

Poague and Paul begin to reorient the discourse, but on To Be or Not to Be (1942) their movement stalls where Lubitsch accelerates. They revisit the release-era anxieties about tonal mixture, then retire from the harder question of how the film fabricates the real by way of its own images.‏ « je dis, la comédie est une opération de véridiction » whispers my inner commentator, and the film knows this. 

The old binary, drama with comic relief or comedy with dramatic relief, is superseded by an apparatus that refuses relief as a principle of address.‌‎ Yes Le Bianrie vieux.

The film’s inaugural wager is simple, incorporate the theater as an optical and acoustic laboratory for cinema’s self-inspection. The Warsaw troupe is not high culture transplanted, it is a clumsy mirror that reflects the mechanism by which images seize authority.‎ « je constate, le théâtre n’ennoblit pas le cinéma, il l’expose », and exposure, here, is technical. 

The troupe’s hamminess, ostentatiously second rate, becomes a calibration grid for measuring the distance between presence and its engineered double.

‏

From the first sequence the images declare themselves unstable, a Warsaw of storefront suffixes that insist too loudly on Poland, a narrator whose authority is both emphatic and brittle. The strolling “Führer,” held together by mustache and gait, is less a character than a switch, it toggles the frame from documentary expectation to theatrical revelation. 

The discourse surrounding Ernst Lubitsch has too often been constrained within the pallid dichotomy of sophistication and frivolity. The habitual invocation of the “Lubitsch touch” obscures the more disquieting, more resonant facets of his œuvre, facets that come to unsettling culmination in To Be or Not to Be (1942).

This film, neither suavely urbane nor comfortably escapist, instead embraces a grotesque comic hybridity, what I—“Ich sage es selbst, mit Nachdruck” ⟨⟩—call screwball antifascism. It is at once marital comedy, wartime melodrama, and an uncanny noir of laughter. That such a generic monstrosity unsettled critics should surprise no one; indeed, “Kunst muss verstören,” I mutter here, aligning myself with Lubitsch’s own silent grin.

This cinematic contraption emerges not from adaptation, as with Lubitsch’s earlier Hollywood ventures, but as an idea born directly of his imagination, assisted by Melchior Lengyel and filtered through Edwin Justus Mayer’s screenplay. To make a comedy of Nazism before Pearl Harbor was no trifling endeavor: Hollywood preferred obliquity, silence, and profitable timidity. Only Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) stood as precedent. 

And yet, by the time Lubitsch unveiled his Warsaw farce in March 1942, America’s belated entry into war had rendered antifascist sentiment a fashionable commodity. Still, even then, Lubitsch dared what others avoided: the Jewish presence. The figure of Greenberg, never explicitly named as such but unmistakably marked, becomes the fulcrum of the film’s ethical daring.

Critics, however, wrinkled their brows. Bosley Crowther, apostle of good taste, condemned the mixture of laughter and catastrophe as vulgar. National Board of Review scribes murmured of incongruity. But Lubitsch had already staged their protest within the film itself. 

The rehearsal sequence of the play Gestapo stages a debate over the propriety of comic inflection in antifascist representation. “Ist das erlaubt?” the director asks. The answer comes, of course, in the very fact of the film’s existence: comedy not merely permitted, but necessary.

Indeed, as Mladen Dolar insists, the film’s greatness derives from its refusal of solemnity. Comedy, he writes, is the proper riposte to fascism’s pomp, the counter-gesture to despair. “Die Komödie ist die beste Antwort,” I too echo, festooned with ⧫⟦✠⟧⧫ symbols of exaggerated emphasis. For fascism itself is a performance, a charade of bullies and sycophants endlessly rehearsing loyalty to their Führer. By parodying this performance, Lubitsch unmasks its essential vacuity.

But to dwell only on the Nazi as clown would miss the film’s subterranean concern: Jewishness in exile. Hollywood, desperate not to estrange markets, had long effaced explicit Jewish presence. Even in wartime, Jews were present only obliquely, “versteckt, verborgen, verschlüsselt.” 

Greenberg’s declaration of Shylock’s speech—“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”—is transmuted in Lubitsch’s version to “Have we not eyes?” The universality is strategic, but the particularity is inescapable. Felix Bressart’s accent, his name, his very nose—these are declarations stronger than any dialogue.

This coming out, staged not as autobiography but as theatricality, is at once radical and melancholy. Greenberg performs his Jewishness before Nazis, but then disappears from the narrative altogether, a void that echoes the very disappearance of Europe’s Jews in the same historical moment. “Ein Schweigen, das schreit,” as I declare to myself in overwrought tones, adorned with ◌۝◌ glyphs.

Parallel to this politics of identity is the marital farce of Joseph and Maria Tura. Jack Benny, with his camp mannerisms and vain fragility, performs an emasculated Hamlet repeatedly interrupted—always at “To be or not to be”—by intrusions of adultery, war, or comedy. His insecurity renders him the perfect foil to Maria, embodied by Carole Lombard in her final role, who refuses domestication, refuses silence, and refuses fidelity. 

She is a “bad girl” of Lubitsch lineage, as untamable as the Jewish trickster-heroes of his earlier German comedies. “Die Frau siegt,” I exclaim with mock solemnity, as if this were a philosophical axiom etched in ✧☍✧ stone.

When the camera retreats to a rehearsal room, the supposed headquarters becomes a stage, and the stage becomes a protocol for making belief visible.‎ « je soutiens, le récit n’explique pas l’image, il l’accuse », and the accusation lands on every swastika that reads as décor. ‍‎

That reversal produces an ethics of spectatorship, since viewers on-screen and viewers off-screen share the same compromised vantage. The deli window closes like a curtain, the crowd stares as if cued, and the voice-over asks how he got here, while the cut answers with a dossier that dissolves into greasepaint.‏ 

The joke about cheese does not trivialise, it calibrates, it tests how repetition empties a sign until it floats. « je remarque, la farce est un solvant », and here it dissolves the Gestapo’s image into rehearseable gesture. ‌‎

Lubitsch positions the film within a network of images already circulating, newsreels, photographs, and Triumph of the Will (1935), whose monumental grammar the film both cites and deactivates. The result is not parody as ornament, it is antipropaganda as method, an interruption of the chain that binds spectacle to command. 

When Maria maneuvers through Siletsky’s rhetoric of happiness, she articulates the logic by which images occupy the world and remove those who will not conform.‎ « je note, l’image d’État est une police du visible ». The cinema replies by staging the police as a role that anyone can play. ‍‎

Two interview scenes, each with Ehrhardt, provide the tightest demonstration of repetition as production rather than copy. 

In the first, Tura plays a colonel with theatrical hesitations, in the second he plays Siletsky before the real colonel, and the earlier rehearsal becomes the template that governs the later performance.‏ The symmetry is not decorative, it is ontological, each meeting manufactures the Gestapo through acting, then reveals that manufacture by overacting. « je propose, l’original n’existe que comme menace proférée par ses reproductions ». ‎

Jack Benny’s Joseph Tura intensifies the argument by being, within the diegesis, a bad actor who acts badly to perfection, a simulacrum that confesses its own seams. His vanity, the third-person hymn to that “great, great Polish actor,” is a running proof that image authority is always negotiated by spectators who remember the body beneath the costume.‏ 

When Ehrhardt says that what Tura did to Shakespeare they are doing to Poland, the line fixes the political ratio of ham to harm. « je conclus, l’excès de style est une technologie de violence ». ‌‎

What follows is not a return to propaganda so much as a controlled contamination of it, the RAF insertions function as counters that refuse to stabilize the ledger. 

The film keeps both modes in suspension, which prevents conclusion from hardening into lesson. Hollywood’s industrial grammar is not exculpated, it is implicated as a parallel engine of image propagation that can shelter the refugee while mimicking the state.‎ « je soutiens encore, toute usine d’images fabrique des armes et des abris ». Lubitsch’s tactic is to let comedy perform a quiet disarmament by exposing how authority is staged. ‍‎

By the end, the question of being is posed as a matter of survivable images, who authors the frame, who supplies the cue, who consents to the salute. The play within the film has not delivered culture to cinema, it has delivered procedure, timing, costume, and the scandal that these are sufficient to conjure power. « je dis enfin, le simulacre n’est pas une chute de la vérité, c’est sa forme opératoire ». 

The film answers by making that form explicit, then by asking us to keep watching after the trick has been explained.

What unites Maria and Greenberg is their outsider status, their irreverence, their refusal of authoritarian dictates. Both speak the key self-reflexive lines of the film: Maria’s wry observation that Nazi destruction is unchecked by censorship, and Greenberg’s climactic Shylock monologue, transfigured from comedy to pathos to resistance. Their absences at the film’s conclusion—she, untamed, he, vanished—resound louder than Joseph Tura’s stumbling soliloquy.

The brilliance of To Be or Not to Be (1942) lies precisely here: its refusal of closure, its refusal of neat genre or moral certainty. Comedy, Lubitsch insists, is not frivolity but a weapon, capable of cutting through fascist pomposity with a sharper edge than melodrama’s tears. Its Jewishness is both hidden and declared, its gender politics both destabilizing and celebratory. And in all this, Lubitsch affirms that art’s duplicity, its artificiality, is the very ground of its truth.

Thus I conclude, with pompous self-quotation: “Die Komödie entlarvt die Macht, weil sie selbst ein Spiel ist.” 

☉⟪⚚⟫☉

Lubitsch's "To Be or Not to Be": The Question of Simulation in Cinema

Hassan Melehy

Film Criticism

Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 2001-2002), pp. 19-40 (22 pages)

Published By: Allegheny College

COMING OUT AS JEWISH: To Be or Not to Be, 1942

(pp. 282-307)

Rick McCormick

From: Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch, Indiana University Press (2020)

Jews, Germans, and Comedy

Shofar

Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2021), pp. 62-82 (21 pages)

Published By: Purdue University Press

R. J. Cardullo

Shylock's Revenge: The Doubly Vanished Jew in Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be

JOEL ROSENBERG

Prooftexts

Vol. 16, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 1996), pp. 209-244 (36 pages)

Published By: Indiana University Press

“Clearly it’s nothing alarming . . . It’s only Shakespeare”

Kristin N. Denslow

Shakespeare Bulletin

Vol. 33, No. 3 (Fall 2015), pp. 421-439 (19 pages)

Published By: The Johns Hopkins University Press

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, from an original story by Melchior Lengyel and

Ernst Lubitsch

Cinematographer: Rudolph Maté

Editor: Dorothy Spencer

Music: Werner R. Heymann and Miklós Rózsa

Production Designer: Vincent Korda

Costume Designer: Irene Lentz (for Carole Lombard)

Running time: 99 minutes

Cast: Carole Lombard (Maria Tura), Jack Benny (Joseph Tura), Robert Stack (Lt. Stanislav Sobinski), Felix Bressart (Greenberg), Lionel Atwill (Rawich), Stanley Ridges (Professor Alexander Siletsky), Sig Ruman (Col. Ehrhardt), Tom Dugan (Bronski), Charles Halton (Dobosh), George Lynn (Actor-Adjutant), Henry Victor (Capt. Schultz), Maude Eburne (Anna, Maria’s maid), Halliwell Hobbes (Gen. Armstrong), Miles Mander (Major Cunningham)

Filmography: Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947)

Do the Dead Exist? (1916)

Shoe Palace Pinkus (1916)

When Four Do the Same (1917)

The Eyes of the Mummy Ma (1918)

Carmen (1918)

Intoxication (1919)

The Doll (1919)

Meyer from Berlin (1919)

My Wife, the Movie Star (1919)

The Oyster Princess (1919)

Madame DuBarry (1919)

Sumurun (aka One Arabian Night, 1920)

Anna Boleyn (aka Deception, 1920)

The Wild Cat (1921)

The Wife of the Pharaoh (1922)

The Flame (1923)

Rosita (1923)

The Marriage Circle (1924)

Three Women (1924)

Forbidden Paradise (1924)

Kiss Me Again (1925)

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)

So This Is Paris (1926)

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927)

The Patriot (1928)

Eternal Love (1929)

The Love Parade (1929)

Monte Carlo (1930)

Paramount on Parade (1930)

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)

Broken Lullaby (1932)

One Hour with You (1932)

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Design for Living (1933)

The Merry Widow (1934)

Angel (1937)

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938)

Ninotchka (1939)

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

That Uncertain Feeling (1941)

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Heaven Can Wait (1943)

A Royal Scandal (1945)

Cluny Brown (1946)

That Lady in Ermine (1948)

Black Comedies about the Holocaust: 

The Great Dictator (1940), directed by Charles Chaplin

Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), directed by Leo McCarey

Me and the Colonel (1958), directed by Peter Glenville
Aren’t We Wonderful! (1958), directed by Kurt Hoffman
Bad Luck (1960), directed by Andrzej Munk
Everybody Go Home (1960), directed by Luigi Comencini
The Two of Us (1967), directed by Claude Berri
Jacob the Liar (1974), directed by Frank Beyer
Seven Beauties (1975), directed by Lina Wertmüller
The Tin Drum (1979), directed by Volker Schlöndorff
Ace of Aces (1982), directed by Gérard Oury
Genghis Cohn (1993), directed by Elijah Moshinsky
Getting Away with Murder (1996), directed by Harvey Miller
Mendel (1997), directed by Alexander Røsler
Snide and Prejudice (1997), directed by Philippe Mora
Life Is Beautiful (1997), directed by Roberto Benigni
Tea with Mussolini (1997), directed by Franco Zeffirelli
The Train of Life (1998), directed by Radu Mihaileanu
Divided We Fall (2000), directed by Jan Hrebejk
Monsieur Batignole (2002), directed by Gérard Jugnot
Everything Is Illuminated (2005), directed by Liev Schreiber
My Führer (2007), directed by Dani Levy

Black Comedies about War

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), directed by Preston Sturges

The Great War (1959), directed by Mario Monicelli

The Good Soldier Schweik (1960), directed by Axel von Ambesser

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrick

King of Hearts (1966), directed by Philippe de Broca

La Grande Vadrouille (1966), directed by Gérard Oury

Closely Watched Trains (1966), directed by Jiří Menzel

The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), directed by Norman Jewison

How I Won the War (1967), directed by Richard Lester

Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), directed by Richard Attenborough

MAS*H (1970), directed by Robert Altman

Catch-22 (1970), directed by Mike Nichols

Black and White in Color (1976), directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

The Inglorious Bastards (1978), directed by Enzo G. Castellari

1941 (1979), directed by Steven Spielberg

Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), directed by Barry Levinson

Wag the Dog (1997), directed by Barry Levinson

Three Kings (1999), directed by David O. Russell

Buffalo Soldiers (2001), directed by Gregor Jordan

Tropic Thunder (2008), directed by Ben Stiller

Inglourious Basterds (2009), directed by Quentin Tarantino

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), directed by Grant Heslov

Filmography: Key Antiwar Films

J’accuse (1919), directed by Abel Gance

The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor

What Price Glory? (1926), directed by Raoul Walsh

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), directed by Lewis Milestone

Westfront 1918 (1930), directed by G. W. Pabst

Wooden Crosses (1932), directed by Raymond Bernard

No Greater Glory (1934), directed by Frank Borzage

The Road to Glory (1936), directed by Howard Hawks

La Grande illusion (1937), directed by Jean Renoir

The Burmese Harp (1956), directed by Kon Ichikawa

Paths of Glory (1957), directed by Stanley Kubrick

Fires on the Plain (1959), directed by Kon Ichikawa

The Bridge (1959), directed by Bernhard Wicki

The Human Condition (No Greater Love [1959]; Road to Eternity [1959]; and A Soldier’s Prayer [1961]), directed by Masaki Kobayashi

Les Carabiniers (1963), directed by Jean-Luc Godard

The Victors (1963), directed by Carl Foreman

King and Country (1964), directed by Joseph Losey

King of Hearts (1966), directed by Philippe de Broca

Beach Red (1967), directed by Cornel Wilde

Johnny Got His Gun (1971), directed by Dalton Trumbo

The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), directed by Lamont Johnson

War Requiem (1989), directed by Derek Jarman

These filmographies from Jews, Germans, and Comedy

R. J. Cardullo

Shofar

Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2021), pp. 62-82 (21 pages)

Published By: Purdue University Press

NOW MY NOTES FOR A 21ST CENTURY APPRAISAL

Much has been said concerning the simulacrum in recent theoretical debates. I understand the term in the following sense, derived from Platonism: a decayed image, the image of an image, and not an image

that participates in the eternal form or eidos (Plato, Republic, 596a-597b). 

What I wish to underscore, in the problematic of representation put forth in To Be or Not to Be, is a re-conception of the simulacrum such that in the discovery of the nonexistence of any fixed and firmly grounded original, the simulacrum may become an affirmation rather than a mere privation - it may become something of value rather than simply indicate its distance and difference from the original. 

That is, by presenting the image of Hitler as a simulacrum rather than grounded in an original model, and hence as one in a series of simulacra, the movie may call into question the legitimacy and fixity of the model and hence produce a space of resistance to the imposition of the Hitlerian image as model. For an excellent commentary on the theoretical prob el le lem "probleme" of the simulacrum, cf. Durham, especially 7-17 ha ha!

Marcel Ophiils, director of what have been regarded as among the most serious depictions of Nazism, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and Hotel Terminus (1988), has called To Be or Not to Be "the most

profound movie ever made about Nazism" (Kroll, 72; quoted in Tifft, 37).

Tifft provides a superb reflection on Hitler's promotion of his own image through a mastery of theatrics and the media, the ways in which his image was reproduced in the European and American media, and

Hitler's resistance to uses of this image that exceeded his control (16-28). 

He marks a significant shift in the attitude toward Hitler's image in the Allied press as the war approached: "Although their moral assessment of [the terrible power of his rhetorical forms] in terms of evil diametrically opposed Hitler's, Allied observers shared with him an inability to apprehend any notion that power might coincide with the laughable. 

Terrified of what Hitler had demonstrated could be done with mechanism and histrionics, confounded in their assumptions that the artificiality of these rhetorical forms guaranteed their ineffectuality, they tried to banish all comic associations with Hitler and to respond to his mechanistic theatricality with a momentous gravity such as would alone, they sensed, suit the menace of his power".

Tifft argues that Lubitsch's response to Hitler, widely perceived in the press as inappropriate, is all the more effective for the incongruity in which it engages.

Cf. Tifft: "Like Hamlet, [the actors] determine to act in a theatrical rather than a martial sense. Lubitsch thus invites the question of whether such acting is a serviceable form of resistance or a travesty of Allied action".

Jack Benny's father didn't view the jarring image of his son in a Gestapo uniform as comical: he stood up and walked out of the theater (Fein, 72; cited in Paul, 245).

I will leave aside the possible psychoanalytic interpretations of the absence of Benny's father that results from his walking out on the movie, at the very moment when his son, in Gestapo uniform, appears to effect a final rejection of the family name.

By restating this question, Tifft points out the relentless self-reflexivity of the opening sequence and the closely related problem of how politics may be conducted via the screen: "How did Hitler get here,

into a Hollywood comedy of manners?"

Comolli and Géré: "At the moment of seeing it, it is impossible to read this first incorrectness of the gesture, and its corrected repetition, otherwise than as an oddness that we expect the ensuing fiction to account for through the psychology of the character.

But a different, retrospective reading is possible: at issue, in fact, is a repetition in the theatrical sense [ repetition : rehearsal], and the actor (Joseph Tura) who plays the Nazi officer expects the scene to begin (or the rehearsals to end - we will later see another Nazi actor-officer protest that he must wait hours and hours for nothing). Yawning and laxness would then be due to the situation of the actor and not to the character.

We would have been witnesses to the off-stage area, to the launching of the action, as if the editor forgot to cut the few meters of film that precede the full range of what is played. Of course, this hesitation and false beginning are there only to establish, even if it is without our knowledge, the theatrical nature of the scene - in other words, to furnish us, even if we can only later grasp it, one more index that betrays the illusion. The film will play us only with the very cards that it places in our hands"

Deleuze: "A question of life or death: the distance between the situations is proportionate to the extent to which the characters know that all hangs on very small differences in behaviour"

Paul reports that Walter Reisch, a close friend of Lubitsch and a screenwriter for him on Ninotchka (1939), identified this line as "the chief source of negative reaction" from the public and critics to the

movie (230). Against the urgings of colleagues, friends, and Vivian Lubitsch, Lubitsch insisted on leaving the line in after the initial screening indicated bad audience response. Cf. also Eyman, 301-303, and Tifft, 3-4.

Weinberg offers an extensive account of Lubitsch's career in Hollywood, 46-189 passim.

Works Cited

Comolli, Jean-Louis and François Géré. "Deux fictions de la haine." Part 2. Cahiers du cinéma 288 (May 1978): 5-15.

Crowther, Bosley. "Against a Sea of Troubles." The New York Times, March 22, 1942.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Domarchi, Jean. "To Be or Not to Be." Cahiers du cinéma 198 (February 1968): 42.

Durham, Scott. Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Eyman, Scott. Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Fein, Irving A. Jack Benny: An Intimate Biography. New York: Putnam, 1976.

Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Kroll, Jack. "The Absurdity of Evil." Newsweek, October 24, 1988.

Lubitsch, Ernst. "Mr. Lubitsch Takes the Floor for Rebuttal." The New York Times, March 29, 1942.

Ophiils, Marcel. Hotel Terminus. Samuel Go 1988.

Rencontre/Télévision Suisse-Romande, 1971.

Paul, William. Ernst Lubitsch's American Comed

bia University Press, 1983.

Poague, Leland. The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch

1978.

Riefenstahl, Leni. Triumph of the Will. Leni Rie

NSDAP-Reichsleitung, 1934.

Rosenberg, Joel. "Shylock's Revenge: The Doub

Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be." Proo

209-44.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A.

LaMar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959.

39

Steiner, Jean-François. Treblinka. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Tifft, Stephen. "Miming the Führer: To Be or Not to Be and the Mecha-

nisms of Outrage." The Yale Yournal of Criticism 5:1 (1991): 1-40.

Weinberg, Herman. The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study. New York:

Dover, 1977.

1. McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, 273.

2. Mayer had been a New York playwright whose plays “were praised for their mordant

humor.” Considered an intellectual in Hollywood, he was active in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi

League. See Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 290–92. See also Barnes, To Be or Not to Be, 19–22.

3. Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 212, 214.

4. While many write that the film failed commercially, Eyman reports that it did make

money (probably a profit of around $300,000)—not a big hit, but not a loss; Ernst Lubitsch,

299–301. See also McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It?, 403–4.

5. Paul, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, 227. Harvey reports that Chaplin’s film was

“the fourth-highest-grossing movie of 1940”; Romantic Comedy, 489.

6. Paul, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, 231.

7. See Bosley Crowther, “The Screen,” review of To Be or Not to Be, New York Times,

March 7, 1942, 13; and “Against a Sea of Troubles: In ‘To Be or Not to Be,’ Ernst Lubitsch

Has Opposed Real Tragedy with an Incongruous Comedy Plot—Other New Films,” New

York Times, March 22, 1942, X3. After Crowther’s first review, Lubitsch had asked to write a

304 | Sex, Politics, and Comedy

rebuttal, but it was not ready by March 22; instead, it appeared a week later: “Mr. Lubitsch

Takes the Floor for Rebuttal,” New York Times, March 29, 1942, X3.

8. Review of To Be or Not to Be and “Editorially Speaking” in The New Movies: The

National Board of Review Magazine, March 1942, 5–6, 3.

9. Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be?,” 111, 113–14. Rosenberg (“Shylock’s Revenge,” 238) argued

similarly, praising the comedy for its prescience “precisely at a time when both laughter and

Jewishness were undergoing their greatest trial.”

10. Wallach stresses, “It was not always the case that Jews could control their level of

visibility”; Passing Illusions, 6–7.

11. See Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 209–44; Gemünden, Continental Strangers, chap.

3. An earlier version of Gemünden’s chapter appeared as “Space Out of Joint: Ernst Lubitsch’s

To Be or Not to Be,” New German Critique 89 (Spring-Summer 2003): 59–80.

12. This chapter is indebted to the groundbreaking work on this film by Rosenberg and

Gemünden mentioned in n. 11 but also to Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish

Identity and Wallach’s Passing Illusions, as well insightful chapters on To Be or Not to

Be written in the 1980s by Paul (Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, 225–56) and Harvey

(Romantic Comedy, 477–93). See also Barnes’s British Film Institute booklet To Be or Not

to Be (2002). Also important are Dolar’s “To Be or Not to Be?” and Elisabeth Bronfen’s

“Lubitsch’s War: Comedy as Political Ploy in To Be or Not to Be,” both chapters in the 2014

anthology by Novak, Dolar, and Krečič, Lubitsch Can’t Wait.

13. Truffaut, “Lubitsch Was a Prince,” 57.

14. Also known as the Polonaise in A Major, op. 40, no. 1. I thank Hui Liu for identifying

this music.

15. Cf. the arrival of the main character in The Student Prince: a huge crowd doffs top hats

at the arrival of the royal train at the station, there is a cut to the door of a train wagon, and

what do we see? A small boy.

16. Gemünden, Continental Strangers, 85, 89.

17. Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be?,” 111, 116; cf. Harvey, Romantic Comedy, 492–93.

18. Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be?,” 127, 129.

19. In the chapter on To Be or Not to Be in his book Continental Strangers (chap. 3),

Gemünden uses the term Teatr Polski, the correct Polish name. In the film, however, we see

signs for the “Theatre Polski.”

20. Rosenberg disputes that Shakespeare’s play is antisemitic, arguing that it displays

“Jew-hatred without participating in it”; “Shylock’s Revenge,” 215–16. See also Stephen

Greenblatt, “If You Prick Us: What Shakespeare Taught Me about Fear, Loathing, and the

Literary Imagination,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2017, 34–39.

21. See Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be?,” 121; Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 297–98. Lubitsch’s

proposal was tongue in cheek. Because of protest letters from Lombard and Benny, United

Artists backed down and approved the title To Be or Not to Be. Urwand comments that with

the censorship of the play Gestapo, “Lubitsch was probably alluding to Hollywood’s dealings

with Georg Gyssling throughout the 1930s”; Collaboration, 309. Gyssling was the German

Consul in Los Angeles who continually put pressure on Breen and the studios to eliminate

any criticism of Nazi Germany in American films.

22. Barnes (To Be or Not to Be, 14) writes that the Polish actors are “mostly Jewish,” but

this is debatable. Perhaps “covertly” they are (like Jack Benny), but this is not obvious to the

audience. The only overtly Jewish character is Greenberg, and in fact some audiences to this

Coming Out as Jewish | 305

day do not realize that Greenberg is Jewish. The word Jew is never spoken in the film—even

in Shylock’s monologue; see Gemünden, Continental Strangers, 92–94.

23. Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 232.

24. As Henry writes, Maria says she loves her husband but “has no scruples about cheating

on him or destroying his performance”; Ethics and Social Criticism, 101.

25. Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be?,” 127.

26. An adulterous affair between Maria and Sobinski is only implied. They do take a

plane ride together. But in the original script, Anna, Maria’s maid, said, “She might hit an air

pocket lying down”—one of the lines listed as objectionable on a handwritten document on

yellow paper in the MPAA Production Code files on To Be or Not to Be at the Herrick Library.

It is the only line on the list that was cut from the film.

27. Lubitsch’s rebuttal, “Mr. Lubitsch Takes the Floor,” New York Times, March 29, 1942.

Lubitsch learned important details about the invasion of Poland by employing Richard

Ordynski as a research expert. He worked in Polish theater and film and had experienced

the invasion of Poland but escaped to Paris and then to the United States. Ordynski “knew

the very theatre building that Lubitsch wanted re-created” and also used his contacts to

“Polish fliers stationed somewhere in Canada” to get uniform details. See Robert Joseph, “The

Research Experts Take a Back Seat,” New York Times, March 1, 1942, X4; see also Gemünden,

Continental Strangers, 89.

28. McBride (How Did Lubitsch Do It?, 395) argues that in The Shop around the Corner,

Anna Karenina alludes to the adultery subplot—so too in To Be or Not to Be.

29. Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 280–81.

30. Harvey, Romantic Comedy, 488.

31. Bronfen, “Lubitsch’s War,” 136.

32. Harvey, Romantic Comedy, 484.

33. See Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 301–2; Harvey, Romantic Comedy, 491. Vivian asked

Lubitsch to cut the line, and the others agreed, but Lubitsch refused to do so.

34. Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be?,” 118–19.

35. Rosenberg makes the same point; “Shylock’s Revenge,” 224–25. The concept derives of

course from Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963;

London: Penguin, 2006).

36. An allusion to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935); see Gemünden,

Continental Strangers, 87.

37. Gemünden (Continental Strangers, 93) reports that the use of the “revenge” line from

Shylock’s speech is a post-Pearl Harbor addition to the script. On other changes to the script

after Pearl Harbor, see Gemünden, 212n46; and Paul, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, 226.

38. Gemünden, Continental Strangers.

39. Spaich, Ernst Lubitsch und seine Filme, 364.

40. Heymann had also composed the music for Angel, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife,

Ninotchka, The Shop around the Corner, and That Uncertain Feeling. To Be or Not to Be was

his last film for Lubitsch, who was not happy with Heymann’s use of “mickey-mousing”

in a serious scene—that is, using background music comically to mimic the actions of the

actors. Lubitsch persuaded another émigré composer, Miklos Rozsa, to change the music

accompanying one scene. See Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 295, 298–99; Renk, Ernst Lubitsch, 127.

41. Cf. Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 303; and Gemünden, Continental Strangers, 96.

42. Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 31.

306 | Sex, Politics, and Comedy

43. See Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler; Urwand, Collaboration. See also Lester D.

Friedman, The Jewish Image in American Film (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1987).

44. Chaplin decided to make the film in response to the Kristallnacht pogroms in

Germany on November 9, 1938. He copyrighted the original script already the next

day, November 10, 1938. According to that script, the film would have ended with the

revelation that all the victorious resistance of the story was actually only the dream of a

Jewish concentration inmate, who gets wakened by an abusive Nazi guard. See Urwand,

Collaboration, 219, 307n71.

45. See Urwand, 235–36.

46. The details were probably based on the reports of Jan Karski from the Polish

resistance. The clip shown at Yad Vashem was identified for me by Mimi Ash, the

acquisitions coordinator of the Visual Center at Yad Vashem, as follows: “Movietone: Count

Raczynski, January 1943; 43268/7108”; the footage consists of “what are apparently outtakes

of a Movietone newsreel never screened,” discovered by the British documentary filmmaker

and scholar, James Barker. Email from Mimi Ash, October 4, 2012. I thank her and Ofer

Ashkenazi, who helped me contact her.

47. Cited by Steve Hunegs, “Atlantic Charter Still Reflects U.S. at its Best,” Star Tribune,

August 12, 2016, A9. Lindbergh made these claims in a national radio broadcast on

September 11, 1941—less than two months before Lubitsch would start filming To Be or Not to

Be, and less than three months before Pearl Harbor.

48. Urwand, Collaboration, 237–43; the poem is reproduced on 241.

49. Again, see Wallach, Passing Illusions.

50. Ashkenazi, Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, 97–98.

51. On Lubitsch and Jewish humor, note again his 1916 interview with Urgiß,

“Künstlerprofil” in Prinzler and Patalas, Lubitsch, 90.

52. There would also be only one more film in which Lubitsch acted: Sumurun, 1920; see

chap. 2.

53. Judah Leib Gordon, cited in Ashkenazi, Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, 48.

54. Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 229.

55. Rosenberg, 214.

56. Changing their names would be held against the Jewish entertainers called up

before HUAC in the late 1940s and early 1950s, during the Red Scare; for example, Danny

Kaye would be challenged by an American congressman to admit that his “real” name was

Kaminsky.

Jack Benny changed his name because an established star already had a name very

similar to his. Still, in Benny’s case, as with so many other Jewish entertainers, the new name

would never be explicitly Jewish—for example, Benny’s wife, born Sadie Marcowitz, changed

her name to the (very WASP-y) Mary Livingstone.

57. See Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 229; Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly

Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 63. See

also the discussion of Jack Benny in Barnes, To Be or Not to Be, 22–25.

58. Paul, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, 234; Harvey, Romantic Comedy, 487.

59. Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 235; Gemünden, Continental Strangers, 91–92.

60. Gemünden, Continental Strangers, 92–94. See the three scenes in the film when

Greenberg recites lines from the Rialto speech: first, 8:06–9:10; second, 23:38–24:03; and

third, 1:28:55–1:30:13.

Coming Out as Jewish | 307

61. See Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 232–33, 219.

62. Rosenberg writes that the tone of Bronski and Tura’s lines about Greenberg on the ride

to the Warsaw airport “makes it sound like an epitaph” (235).

63. Gemünden, Continental Strangers, 92; cf. the horrible reality of what would happen

in the actual Warsaw ghetto in the spring and summer of 1942, as depicted (through a

critical interrogation of Nazi film footage) in A Film Unfinished (2010), an Israeli-German

documentary.

64. Rosenberg, “Shylock’s Revenge,” 237. Barnes (To Be or Not to Be, 7) and Dolar (“To Be or

Not to Be?,” 113) make the same point. The Wannsee Conference took place January 20, 1942.

65. Dolar, “To Be or Not to Be?,” 113–14.

66. Bronfen, “Lubitsch’s War,” 150.

67. Bronfen, 149–50.

68. Comparing Shylock with Lubitsch’s “fallen women,” Rosenberg notes that

Shakespeare gives Shylock a “mixture of both decent and ignoble motives” and that Lubitsch

treats the title character in Madame Dubarry similarly; “Shylock’s Revenge,” 216.

69. Rosenberg, 227–28.

70. Harvey, Romantic Comedy, 479, 491. See also Barnes (To Be or Not to Be, 26), who

reports that Lombard “told her biographer that the film was the happiest of her career: ‘The

one time when everything began right, stayed right and ended right.’”

Harvey (479) claims that Lombard’s tragic death in a plane crash January 16, 1941,

three weeks after filming ended, contributed to the film’s “failure.” It did delay the film’s

release until March, but the film made money, and contemporary reviews considered it one

of Lombard’s best performances; see, e.g., Louella Parsons, “Carole Gay, Glamorous,” Los

Angeles Examiner, February 20, 1942; Nelson B. Bell, “To Be or Not to Be,” Washington Post,

March 20, 1942. Even the most critical reviews—e.g., Crowther (“The Screen,”) and Mildred

Martin (“Last Lombard Picture Opens on Stanley Screen,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March

12, 1942)—praised Lombard’s performance. The crash occurred in Nevada as Lombard was

returning from a war bond tour. See Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch, 299–300. McBride (How Did

Lubitsch Do It?, 403) reports Orson Welles’s (unsubstantiated) claim that the plane was shot

down by Nazi agents.

71. Lubitsch had played with the taboo about entering the lavatory of the “opposite” sex

before (see chap. 1, n. 105); in To Be or Not to Be, the taboo is finally broken.

72. Bronfen, “Lubitsch’s War,” 150. She writes that Maria’s “intervention . . . uses the force

of off-screen space.”

1. Cf. Charles Musser, "Ethnicity,Role-Playing, and American Film Comedy: From

Chinese Laundry Scene to Whoopee! (1894-1930)/' in Lester D. Friedman, ed., Unspeakable

Images:Ethnicityand American Cinema (Urbana and Chicago, 1991),pp. 53-54.

2. James Harvey, Romantic Comedy inHollywood from Lubitschto Sturges (New York,

1987), p. 4. Harvey's discussion of To Be or Not to Be is found on pp. 477-93. On the

Production Code, see n. 16, below. A useful survey of the literatureon Lubitsch up through

1977 is Robert Carringer and Barry Sabath, Ernst Lubitsch:A Guide toReferencesand Resources

(Boston,1978).

3. The film in fact turned a small profit even as this action was being taken, though it

was scant consolation to the film's backers?see Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch:Laughter in

Paradise (New York, 1993), p. 300. On the various factors,both extrinsic and intrinsic,that

caused the film to flop, cf.Harvey, Romantic Comedy,pp. 479-81.

4. On Lubitsch's relation to both Kammerspieland Spektakelfilm,cf. Frieda Gr?fe, "Was

Lubitsch ber?hrt" [What Lubitsch touches],inHans Helmut Prinzler and Enno Patalas, eds.,

Lubitsch (Munich, 1984), pp. 81-87, esp. pp. 85-86. Because of limitationsof time and

expense, I have had to base my own knowledge of Lubitsch on twenty-eightof his films,

made between 1914 and 1947, a number ofwhich I have seen at archives (I am grateful to the

staffsof the UCLA Film Archive, the Harvard Film Archive, the George Eastman House,

and theMunich Film Museum, as well as Mr. Enno Patalas, for their generous assistance in

these matters), and on written descriptions of the others. Sabine Hake, Passions and

Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch(Princeton,1992), has commendably revived

interestin Lubitsch's early works, although the book suffersfrom a tendency to overvalue

those works at the expense of the later ones?and from being, in places, a virtual concerto of

Lacanian and Metzian buzzwords.

5. More precisely,Fritz Lang was a half-Jew;and Josef von Sternberg had been living

back and forth between Europe and America since the age of seven. (Sternberg and

Stroheim took "von" before their last names as an affectationforpublicity.) On the history of

European emigres in the Hollywood film industry,see, in general, John Russell Taylor's

iUuminatingstudy,Strangersin Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres,1933-50 (London, 1983), as

well as John Baxter,The Hollywood Emigres(New York, 1976), and Jan-ChristopherHorak,

Anti-Nazi Filme der deutschsprachigenEmigrationvon Hollywood,1929-1945 (M?nster,1985). A

useful essay on Lubitsch's emigre perspective is Leo Braudy, "The Double Detachment of

Ernst Lubitsch," in idem, Native Informant:Essays on Film, Fiction,and Popular Culture (New

York, 1991),pp. 67-76.

6. On the importance of Jewishnessto Lubitsch's artistic vision, cf. Gr?fe, "Was

Lubitsch ber?hrt" (see n. 4, above), p. 86 n. 6. Hake, Passions and Deceptions,pp. 24-36; also,

Patricia Erens's review of Hake's book in Film Quarterly 47 (Winter1993-94) 2:59. On the

other side of the spectrum from sympatheticevaluations of Lubitsch's Jewishness is the

scornfulappraisal of Lotte Eisner (herselfa Jew),in The Haunted Screen:Expressionismin the

German Cinema and the InfluenceofMax Reinhardt(Berkeley,Los Angeles, and Oxford, 1965),

pp. 75-87, esp. 79-80.

7. See Eyman, Laughterin Paradise, p. 15; cf. p. 244.

8. My observations are prompted most of all by the marvelous photo that forms the

frontispiece of Herman Weinberg's affectionate,hagiographic study of Lubitsch, The

Lubitsch Touch (New York, 1968).

9. These characters appeared in such early Lubitsch films as Die Firma heiratet[The

firm marries, 1914],SchuhpalastPinkus [Pinkus's shoe palace, 1916],and Meyer aus Berlin

[Meyer from Berlin, 1918].Enno Patalas, "Ernst Lubitsch: German Period," inRichard Roud,

ed., Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (New York, 1980), 2:639-43, finds a strong analogy between

these portrayals and Chaplin's tramp.

10. For intelligentdiscussion of Hollywood's avoidance of Jewish characters and

themesin the1930sand 1940s,see LesterD. Friedman,Hollywood'sImageof theJew(New

York,1982),pp. 55-132,and theillustratedabridgmentof thiswork,The JewishImagein

American Film (Secaucus, N.J., 1987), pp. 33-51,114-46. Also useful isNeal Gabler, An Empire

ofTheirOwn:How theJewsInventedHollywood(New York,1988).

11. Gr?fe, p. 86, astutely senses, behind the legendary breezy cosmopolitan, Parisian

charm ofMaurice Chevalier in such Lubitsch films as The Love Parade, The Smiling Lieutenant,

One Hour with You, and The Merry Widow (according to her, it is Lubitsch who deserves

principal credit for bringing this image to a mass audience), the early Lubitsch character

Sally Pinkus.

12. Biographical informationon Bressart is unfortunately scant. Prinzler, in a marginal

note to his biographical sketch of Lubitsch, "Berlin 19.1.1892?Hollywood 30.11.1947.

Bausteine zu einer Lubitsch-Biografie,"in Prinzler and Patalas, Lubitsch (see n. 4, above),

p. 55,praisesBressart'sstyleof "precipitousJewishcomedy"("j?dische,abgr?ndige

Komik"). Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia(New York, 1979), s.v. "Bressart,Felix," notes

that the Nazi rise to power necessitated Bressarfs emigration from Europe. Bressart's

Jewishness aside, the failure to deal with the Jewishness of Bressart's Greenberg in 7b Be or

Not to Be is a principal weakness of such studies as William Paul's Ernst Lubitsch's American

Comedy (New York, 1983), pp. 225-56; Graham Petrie's "Theater, Film, Life," Film Comment,

May 1974, pp. 38-43 (which confuses Greenberg with Bronski); and Leland Poague's The

Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch (South Brunswick, N.J. and New York, 1978), pp. 85-92. More

appropriateweightis givento thisfactorby Friedman,Hollywood'sImageof theJew,

pp. 110-12,and Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1983),

pp. 190-91,andGreenbergfiguresprominently(withoutbeingidentifiedas Jewish)inUwe

Naumann's discussion of the film in Zwischen Tr?nen und Gel?chter:SatirischeFaschis

muskritik,1933bis1945(Cologne,1983),pp. 358-70,esp.369-70.

13.An Anglophileperspectivewas especiallystronginAmericanfilmsof theearly

war years, a trend that coincided with the closing of continental Europe as a market for

American films and the concurrent expansion of film exportation to Britain. Cf. Clayton

R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes toWar: How Politics,Profits,and Propaganda

Shaped World War IIMovies (London, 1987), pp. 17-47 (esp. 22, 34), 223-34.

14. On the semantic significance of names in To Be orNot to Be, cf. Jean-Louis Comolli

and Francois G6re\ "Deux Fictions de la haine [2]," Cahiers du cinema 288 (May 1978): 6.

15. For discussion of ideological factors shaping classical Hollywood cinema, see,

among others, Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon:Spectatorshipin American Silent Film

(Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 1-125; also, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin

Thompson,TheClassicalHollywoodCinema:FilmStyleandMode ofProductionto1960(New

York, 1985),and Jean-LouisBaudry'sseminal (if, inmy opinion,problematic)essay

"IdeologicalEffectsof theBasicCinematographicApparatus"(pub.orig. in Frenchin

Cinethique7-8 [1970])inNarrative,Apparatus,Ideology:A FilmTheoryReader,ed. PhilipRosen

(New York,1986),pp. 286-98.

16.The ProductionCode Administration(PCA)was theHollywoodfilm industry's

principal means of self-policing on matters of censorship. For an intelligentdiscussion of the

roleof PCA censorshipin theyearsimmediatelyprecedingWorldWar n, see Koppesand

Black,HollywoodGoestoWar,pp. 12-47.A fulltextof theCode's regulationsis foundin

LeonardJ.Leff,TheDamein theKimono:Hollywood,Censorship,and theProductionCodefrom

the1920stothe1960s(New York,1990),pp. 283-92.

17. See Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, p. 345; Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to

War, pp. 17ff.

18.See Friedman,Hollywood'sImageof theJew,pp. 95-100;idem,TheJewishImagein

American Film, pp. 46-48; Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, pp. 170-73. See also Thomas

The Doubly VanishedJew in ErnstLubitsch'sTo Be orNot toBe 241

Doherty,ProjectionsofWar:Hollywood,AmericanCulture,andWorldWar II (NewYork,1993),

pp. 122-48.

19. Among themany studies that consider Shakespeare's attitude toward Jews,see

HaroldBloom,ed.,Shylock(NewYork,1991),esp.thefineessayofRen6Girard,"To Entrap

theWisest/"(pp.291-304),and theusefulcontributionsofKiernanRyan(pp.79-84)and

Alan C. Dessen (pp.252-63);also,JohnGross,ShylockA Legendand ItsLegacy(New York,

1992);EstherL. Panitz,TheAlieninTheirMidst:ImagesofJewsinEnglishLiterature(London

and Toronto,1981),pp. 42-63;DietrichSchwanitz,ShylockvonShakespearebiszumN?rnberger

Prozess(Hamburg,1989);aswell as olderworkssuchasHaroldFisch,TheDual Image:The

Figureof theJewin Englishand AmericanLiterature(New York,1971),pp. 25-52;Edgar

Rosenberg,FromShylocktoSvengali:JewishStereotypesinEnglishFiction(Stanford,1960),

pp. 21-38;HermanSinsheimer,Shylock:TheHistoryofa Character(New York,1964),esp.

pp. 83-67. Perhaps themost expanded case for a view of Shakespeare as a Jew-hater,by

heritage ifnot by inclination,is E. E. Stoll's 1911 essay, "Shylock," in idem, ShakespeareStudies

(New York, 1927), excerpted in Bloom, Shylock,pp. 85-100. A more recent (and, inmy

opinion, unsuccessful) statement of the case is Derek Cohen, "Shylock and the Idea of the

Jew," in Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller, eds., JewishPresences in English Literature

(Montreal,1990),pp. 25-39(alsoinBloom,Shylock,pp. 305-16).

20. Attention towhat is systematically disowned in human knowledge and interac

tion,to the lie one tells oneself about the boundaries of one's existence?in short, to "bad

faith" in Sartre's sense of the term?has informed,in one way or another, the following wise

approaches to Shakespeare, all relevant to the present context Harry Berger,Jr.,"King Lear:

The Lear Family Romance," Centennial Review 23 (1979): 348-76; idem, "Marriage and

MercifixioninTheMerchantofVenice:The CasketSceneRevisited,"ShakespeareQuarterly32

(1981):155-62;StanleyCavell,"TheAvoidanceofLove:A ReadingofKing Lear,"in idem,

DisowningKnowledgeinSix PlaysofShakespeare(Cambridge,1987),pp. 29-123;Girard,"To

Entrap theWisest'" (see prec. note); and Edward Andrew's ingenious use of The Merchant of

Venice for his grammar of rights discourse from Hobbes to Locke, in Shylock'sRights: A

Grammar ofLockian Claims (Toronto,Buffalo,and London, 1988), esp. pp. 27-50.

21. Idepartin thisrespectfromallwho considerLubitschapoliticalor ahistorical.The

most extreme case has been stated, with referenceto Lubitsch's German silents, by Siegfried

Kracauer,FromCaligaritoHitler:A PsychologicalStudyof theGermanFilm(Princeton,1947),

pp. 48-55. I find similarly questionable William Paul's tendency to see Lubitsch as only

belatedly political, when, in the 1930s, he attempted to reckon more directly with economic

hard times (in Trouble in Paradise and The Shop around the Corner), the Soviet Union and

Stalinism(inNinotchka),andNazism (inTo Be orNottoBe).As Gr?fepersuasivelyargues

("Was Lubitsch ber?hrt," pp. 84-87), a keen sense of economic, social, and political

contradiction was integralto Lubitsch's artistic vision from the start.

22. Within its boundaries, The Merchant of Venice establishes a comparable symmetry.

In a play where Shylock's principal counterpartis Antonio, the dramatic culmination

temporarilyshifts the polarity to Shylock and the rabid Jew-haterGratiano, and there (TV,i,

303-12)thesymmetryisquitedeliberate.

23. Cf. Andrew, Shylock'sRights, p. 12: "we cannot conclude, from our intuition that

Shylock'sclaim tohis poundof fleshismorallyunattractive,thathe did nothave a rightto

his poundof flesh";and ibid.,p. 44:"Dinah'sbrothers[inGenesis34]exacteda hideous

revenge. Shylock's revenge, while cruel, is neither deceitful nor blasphemous as with the

revenge of Dinah. Shylock's revenge for the daughter of Leah is frank,open, and consonant

with the law of Venice."

24.See TheMerchantofVenice,V, i,15and V, i,292.

25. The following lines from The Merchant ofVenice could, indeed, serve as conceptual

underpinning of Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws:

Portia:  Tarry, Jew!

The law hath yet another hold on you.

It is enacted in the laws of Venice,

If it be proved against an alien,

That by direct or indirect attempts

He seek the life of any citizen,

The party 'gainst which he dothc ontrive

Shall seize one half his goods; the other half

Comes to the privy coffer of the state;

And the offender's life lies in the mercy

Of the Duke only, 'gainst all other voices.

(IV,i,345-55;my italics)

As some observers have argued, an indispensable firststep in the destruction of Europe's

Jewswas toredefinetheJewas an alien,tostripJewsof all rightsas citizensof recognized

nations.See Raul Hilberg,TheDestructionof theEuropeanlews(New York,1961,1979),

pp. 43-53;HannahArendt,EichmanninJerusalem:A Reporton theBanalityofEvil(NewYork,

1963),pp. 56-132,esp.56-67;RichardRubenstein,TheCunningofHistory:TheHolocaustand

theAmericanFuture(New York,1975),pp. 31-35.

26. That a universally binding sense of moral responsibility was Lubitsch's central

concerninTo Be orNot toBe is suggestedby hiswell-knowndefenseof thefilmagainstits

critics.See theNew YorkTimes,29March1942:"Iwas tiredof thetwoestablishedrecognized

recipes: drama with comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief.I had made up my

mind tomake a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time."

27. When Dobosh later complains that something about Bronski's appearance as Hitler

looks inauthentic,he says: "I just can't smell Hitler in him." Greenberg says: "I can."

28. In particular, Henri Bergson, "Laughter," inWylie Sypher, ed., Comedy (Garden

City,N.Y.,1956),pp. 61-190.InterestingapplicationofBergsontoLubitsch'ssubjecthas been

made by Stevenlifft,"MimingtheF?hrer:To Be orNot toBe and theMechanismsof

Outrage,"TheYaleJournalofCriticism5 (fall1991)1:1-40;see esp.19-20;lifftalso introduces

theperspectivesof ArthurKoestler,TheActofCreation(1964;repr.New York,1945),

pp. 35-36, 59, and Jacques Derrida, The Archeology of the Frivolous:Reading Condillac, trans.

John P. Leavey, Jr.(Lincoln, Nebr., 1980)?see "Miming the F?hrer," pp. 8 and 39 nn. 22-23.

Probablythemosthelpfultheoristin thepresentcontextisMikhailBakhtin,inRabelaisand

His World, trans.Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, 1965). Cf. the useful adaptation of Bakhtin's

theory of the carnivalesque to film theory and criticism by Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures:

BaWitin,Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore,1989).

29. Even a reader of cinema as astute as Parker Tyler was moved to find this film's

"cartoon" dimension silly and offensive.See Parker Tyler, "To Be or Not to Be, or, The

CartoonTriumphant,"in idem,HollywoodHallucinations(New York,1944),pp. 208-21.

Among comparably hostile contemporary receptions to the film, see esp. Bosley Crowther's

reviewin theNew YorkTimes8:3 (29March 1942),whichdeemedthefilm "callousand

macabre." A more sympathetic,ifstill hedged, reception was that of James Shelley Hamilton

inTheNationalBoardofReviewMagazine(March1942),pp. 5-6;seeWeinberg,The Lubitsch

Touch, pp. 158-61. Postwar evaluations, especially among Jewish film historians, have been

evenmore sympathetic.See Friedman,Hollywood'sImageoftheJew,pp. 110-12;PatriciaErens,

TheJewinAmericanCinema,pp. 190-91;and AnnetteInsdorf,IndelibleShadows:Filmand the

Holocaust (New York, 1983,1989), pp. 71-74.

This situation has been chronicled most damningly by David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York, 1984), and in Martin Ostrow's recent public-television documentary,America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference (1994). See also Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief:The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945 (New York, 1986), and Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution" (Boston,1980).

41. The sexually voracious woman has had a long history in literature and film, as argued, for example, by Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism,Film Theory, Psycho analysis (New York and London, 1991),esp. pp. 1-14; and E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York and London, 1988), esp. pp. 5-6,49-59. But I believe that Lubitsch, most notably in films like Lady Windemere's Fan, Design for Living,and To Be or Not to Be, defies the classic patterns forwhat Kaplan calls a "discourse of patriarchy." 

42. Molly HaskelTs astute reflectionin From ReverencetoRape: The TreatmentofWomen

in theMovies (New York, 1974), pp. 97-102, esp. 97-99, is especially helpful here.

43. The utterances eliciting the reassurance are meaningful emblems of their respective

speakers. Tura asks: "Tell me?am I losing my grip?" Siletsky asks: "Do I look like a

monster?"

44. I use the term "counterhistory"in amanner somewhat differentfrom that put forth

by Amos Funkenstein,"History,Counterhistory,and Narrative," in Saul Friedlander,ed.,

Probing the Limits of Representation:Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge and London,

1992), pp. 66-81. What Funkenstein found reprehensibleinworks masquerading as earnest

history is less so inworks of satire,where a self-conscious,self-aware,and ironic stance is

inherentto the work from the start.Cf. Hayden White, "Historical Emplotment and the

Problem of Truth," in Friedlander,Probing the Limits,pp. 37-53, esp. 44-45.

On the figure of the schlemiel,see, above all, Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemielas Modern Hero (Chicago, 1971), esp. chap. 1.

That "the uncommitted American" has been an important topic of American film over several decades has been interestingly argued by, among others, Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton,1985), esp. pp. 55-125. Cf. Barbara Deming, Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Films of the '40s (New York, 1969), pp. 1-38.

That the film's perspective ultimately rises above cynicism has been stressed cogently by Harvey, Romantic Comedy,p. 492.

On the over-the-shoulder shot, cf. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, Wise, 1985), p. 177. See also BordwelTs remarks on "volumetric" space, ibid., p. 171. In the present scene, Lubitsch uses both a flat, frontal shot (in his initial presentation of Bronski/Hitler and Greenberg in face-to-face profile) and the volumetric shot, as part of a camera sequence that heightens Greenberg's physical presence precisely at the moment that Greenberg stresses,via Shylock, the irreducibly physical presence of the Jew ("Aren't we human? Have we not eyes? Have we not hands, organs, senses, dimensions, affections, passions?"). On Lubitsch's use of filmic space generally, cf. Barbara Bowman, Master Space: Film Images of Capra, Lubitsch, Sternberg, and Wyler (New York, 1992), pp. 61-82. 

49. This film's treatment of the image of Hitler is a subject worthy of a separate study. For present purposes, it suffices to note that the sole glimpse of an "actual" Hitler in the film (i.e., one not enacted by Bronski) is a direct and debunking allusion to the rear view of Hitler shown at the opening of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1934), here a tellingly precise cinematic rebuff both to the historical Hitler and to his adoring cinematic mystifier, Riefenstahl herself.

As Bordwell has shown {Narration,pp. 99-146), the camera's perspective is in no way synonymous with that of either the characters (point-of-view shots notwithstanding) or the spectator.The camera is thus not here "representing" either the audience or the listening figure of Bronski / Hitler. But the removal of any visible recipient nonetheless shifts the field of discourse from the dramatized setting to the film audience and its world, precisely at the moment when that expanded perspective becomes most relevant to the words of the scene.

Cf. Harvey, Romantic Comedy,p. 13: "People don't just go out of a Lubitsch frame: they vacate it, leave it empty.We see them and then we see their absence."

Lubitsch's clear preference of the American over the German environment for filmmaking was suggested in his 1924 essay, "Unsere Chancen in Amerika" (reprinted in Prinzler and Patalas, Lubitsch,pp. 102-5).

Research and travel costs for this article were partly covered by Tufts University and

the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) remains one of the most peculiar objects of the American studio era. At once comic, tragic, and eerily prophetic, it occupies a strange position in the cultural landscape of the Second World War. 

It is neither pure propaganda nor simple escapism. Rather, it is a deliberate affront to the very idea of authoritarian dignity. Lubitsch, who had already honed the famously delicate “Lubitsch touch” in films such as Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Ninotchka (1939), here sought to direct that touch against Adolf Hitler himself. The results are startling: the Führer transformed into farce, the Gestapo reduced to buffoonery, the Polish theater troupe elevated into unlikely heroes.

The film begins in Warsaw in the uneasy months before the Nazi invasion. Joseph Tura, played by Jack Benny, struts across the stage as Hamlet, while his glamorous wife Maria, played by Carole Lombard, receives the attentions of a young admirer, 

Lieutenant Sobinski, played by Robert Stack. This seemingly frivolous triangle quickly collides with politics, as the troupe becomes entangled in espionage, impersonation, and the high stakes of resistance. In this unstable mingling of love story, theatrical farce, and wartime intrigue, Lubitsch conjured a work of remarkable audacity.

It is necessary to situate the film historically. February 1942 was a moment of grave uncertainty. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had only recently propelled the United States into war. Hitler’s armies occupied most of Europe, and the German advance into the Soviet Union had not yet been reversed. The great battles of Stalingrad and Kursk lay in the future. 

In such a context, for Hollywood to release a comedy mocking the Nazis was nothing less than daring. The laughter was directed not at a vanquished enemy but at an ongoing threat.

Carole Lombard’s presence gives the film a double poignancy. She had been a reigning star of screwball comedy in the 1930s, immortalized in My Man Godfrey (1936) and Twentieth Century (1934). Here she appears poised, luminous, and commanding, lending her characteristic wit to Maria Tura while hinting at darker undercurrents. 

Tragically, she perished in a plane crash in January 1942, only weeks before the film’s release. Her death gave the work a haunted quality, as if the film itself had become a memorial. Viewers in 1942 could not avoid watching Lombard as a kind of ghost, delivering her final performance in a story about survival under the shadow of death.

Jack Benny, better known as a radio comedian, offers in Joseph Tura his most substantial film role. Benny’s character is both vain and endearing, a parody of the insecure actor who suspects the audience is walking out during his soliloquy.

Yet his theatrical pomposity becomes the unlikely foundation for heroism. Lubitsch here suggests that even the ridiculous can become useful in desperate times. Benny never equaled this performance elsewhere, though he continued to cultivate his self-deprecating persona in later films such as George Washington Slept Here (1942).

Robert Stack, still at the beginning of his long career, plays Sobinski with straight-faced sincerity. Later generations would know him from Written on the Wind (1956) and the crime series The Untouchables (1959–63). 

Here, however, he is a youthful romantic, almost absurdly earnest in his devotion. His presence contrasts with the self-absorption of Joseph Tura, sharpening the comedy of marital jealousy while also grounding the plot in wartime seriousness.

Sig Ruman, as the bumbling Colonel Ehrhardt, completes the ensemble of memorable figures. Ruman had already played authoritarian buffoons in Ninotchka (1939) and would continue to embody such types in A Night in Casablanca (1946). 

His Ehrhardt is a man terrified of being caught laughing at a Hitler joke, terrified of conspiracies, terrified of his own incompetence. He becomes the embodiment of authoritarian fragility.

The feminist dimension of the film lies in Lombard’s role. Maria Tura is not simply a passive spouse. She is a skilled performer who manipulates men’s desires and Nazi gullibility alike. Her admirers underestimate her, but she repeatedly proves decisive.

It is she who seduces the spy Siletsky in order to gain information. It is she who balances the vanity of her husband with the idealism of Sobinski. While the men posture, she acts. In this sense, the film presents a rare wartime portrait of female agency: comedy does not erase her power, but accentuates it.

The larger American context is crucial. To Be or Not to Be (1942) was released at a time when the United States was mobilizing for global war, rationing materials, and drafting young men. The film therefore embodies the cultural work of ridicule. 

By making Hitler ridiculous, by showing the Gestapo as fools, Lubitsch offered American audiences a form of psychological resistance. Laughter became a weapon. One recalls the contemporaneous political cartoons of Dr. Seuss, who likewise caricatured dictators. The film belongs to this broader national effort to transform terror into something manageable.

The film’s relationship to film noir should also be acknowledged. Though it is ostensibly a comedy, its visual texture often slides toward the noir tradition. Warsaw is depicted in shadows, bombed streets, and claustrophobic interiors. Espionage, disguise, and the constant threat of exposure are staples of noir. The characters are caught in webs of deception, never sure who is who. 

The moment when Joseph Tura impersonates the spy Siletsky and must confront the corpse of the real Siletsky is pure noir grotesquerie. The comedy is inseparable from the menace. In this sense, Lubitsch anticipated the hybrid forms of later noir-inflected war films such as Ministry of Fear (1944).

The supporting cast deepens the film’s texture. Stanley Ridges, who plays Professor Siletsky, had already appeared in noirish fare such as The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945). His smooth duplicity makes him the true villain, a reminder that the Nazis could not be defeated by ridicule alone. Felix Bressart, playing the Jewish actor Greenberg, gives the film one of its most moving moments when he recites Shylock’s speech about humanity. 

Bressart, a German-Jewish émigré, had previously appeared in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka and would later feature in The Seventh Cross (1944), another narrative of Nazi oppression. His presence links the comedy to the real tragedy of exile. Lionel Atwill, who appears as Rawitch, was a familiar face from Universal horror films and the proto-noir Doctor X (1932), adding a theatrical flourish to the ensemble.

The audacity of To Be or Not to Be (1942) is evident in its willingness to make jokes about concentration camps, at a time when the full horror of extermination was not yet known in America. Contemporary audiences may find these moments troubling. 

Yet one must remember that in 1942 the camps were understood as places of political imprisonment rather than industrialized death. The very tastelessness of the humor reflects the limited knowledge of the time. To laugh at “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt” was to imagine that such places could be mocked, not yet realizing the scale of the genocide unfolding.

Critical response in 1942 was divided. Some hailed the wit; others found it offensive. The film performed poorly at the box office, especially compared to Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). The timing was unfortunate: Lombard’s death cast a pall, and audiences in the first months of America’s war were not ready for laughter. Only later did the film acquire recognition, culminating in its selection for the National Film Registry in 1996.

From a structural perspective, Lubitsch relied on theatrical devices of repetition and mistaken identity. The recurring gag of Sobinski leaving his seat whenever Joseph Tura begins “To be or not to be” functions as a metatheatrical commentary on the fragility of performance. The boundary between stage and reality dissolves. 

Actors become spies, and spies become actors. The film insists that identity is always a matter of role-playing. This is not simply comedy but a philosophical meditation on performance itself.

One must also recognize the expatriate dimension of the production. Lubitsch himself was a German Jew who had left Europe for Hollywood. Melchior Lengyel, who wrote the original story, was Hungarian. Several actors, including Bressart, were émigrés. The film thus represents an émigré revenge fantasy: displaced artists mocking the tyrants who had driven them out. It is art as survival.

The dialogue is layered with irony. When Joseph Tura insists that an actor is a matter of life and death, the line reverberates beyond the theater. When Maria Tura manipulates Siletsky by feigning admiration, the comedy shades into menace. These tonal shifts are characteristic of Lubitsch, who delighted in the ambiguity between laughter and seriousness.

To see the film now is to recognize its uncanny resilience. It is not simply a period piece but an exploration of how comedy can confront catastrophe. Its hybrid form, oh ya, it's real half farce, half spy thriller, yah got, prefigures the later experiments of Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove (1964). Both films ask whether one can laugh at the prospect of annihilation. Both suggest that laughter may be the only possible response.

If one considers To Be or Not to Be (1942) within the larger American story, it emerges as a cultural artifact of democratic resilience. The United States in 1942 was mobilizing not only its armies but its imagination. 

Hollywood served as a weapon, shaping morale. By making fun of Hitler, the film reminded Americans that tyranny could be ridiculed, that freedom included the right to laugh. This is no small matter. Satire itself becomes a political act.

The ending, in which the troupe escapes by impersonating Nazi officers, encapsulates the film’s paradox. The actors’ very absurdity secures their survival. Theater becomes resistance. In this sense, Lubitsch offers not only comedy but a political allegory: art itself is a weapon against oppression.

Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Sig Ruman, Stanley Ridges, Lionel Atwill, and Felix Bressart all contribute to this peculiar blend. Their careers link the film to both screwball comedy and noir, to Hollywood glamour and émigré tragedy. 

The convergence of these elements could never be repeated. Even Mel Brooks’s 1983 remake, charming in its way, cannot capture the charged atmosphere of 1942.

Thus To Be or Not to Be (1942) occupies a unique position in film history. It is at once a comedy, a tragedy, a war film, a noir, and a memorial. Its laughter is uneasy, its jokes precarious, its glamour shadowed by death. To laugh at Nazis in 1942 was an act of defiance. To laugh with Carole Lombard in her final role is to sense the fragility of life itself. Lubitsch transformed theater into weaponry, comedy into courage, and farce into history.

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

Genres - Comedy, Comedy Drama, Romance, War, Pas de noir  |   Sub-Genres - Black Comedy Film, Comedy Drama  |   Release Date - Mar 6, 1942  |   Run Time - 99 min.  |