To Be or Not to Be
Released 1942, direct by Ernst Lubitsch
To Be or Not to Be (whose title is a subtle test of one’s knowledge of the rules of English capitalization) begins with Hitler standing on the street corner in Warsaw in1939. To understand why Hitler is standing on the street corner in Warsaw in 1939, we need to stop in at Berlin. And when we stop in at Berlin, who do we meet there but Hitler – who is meant to be in Poland but in any case, Heil Hitler go his subordinates. Hitler in turn greets them with Heil myself – because this is a play staged in Warsaw, and Hitler is a Polish actor ad-libbing; in a moment, accused of lacking verisimilitude, he will go out on the street to see who he can fool. And so that is why Hitler is standing on the street corner in Warsaw in 1939; and also why we are prepared from the beginning for things in this film to get a bit dizzying.
First though Poland needs to be invaded; and before that the plot needs to get set up. This is a film of setups and payoffs; the initial scenes have a little of the heaviness of shells being loaded with bent backs into the chamber of a howitzer, and similarly command a certain studious, mathematical interest. Maria Tura (Carole Lombard in her last performance, doing beautiful things with syllables) and her husband Joseph (Jack Benny) are actors, embedded within a large, quarrelsome but familial troupe, he flustered and possessive, she cool and serenely acquisitive. Thus she acquires a young admirer, the Polish bomber pilot Sobinski (Robert Stack), whose earnestness she parries with a put-on dazedness. Her intentions with him are playful, whereas her bond with Joseph is serious, that of a co-professional. These relationships sketched, war can now break out.
Sobinski escapes to England, but with great, swift, narrative dexterity is allowed to suss out a spy, Siletsky (Stanley Ridges), who having collected data on the Polish resistance is now en route to Warsaw to roll up the network. There’s nothing for Sobinski to do except circle back in pursuit. Once arrived he draws in Maria and Joseph and the rest of the troupe, whose impersonations – initially just of Siletsky but quickly spiraling outward to encompass large swaths of the Nazi bureaucracy – both empower them and further entangle them with the Germans.
This series of performances form the core of the film, and once things get going we are rarely in a scene without some element of deceit. Moreover once a scene has been played it is always echoed by later scenes, collecting resonances and cross-currents: just as characters play dress-up, so do concepts and sequences. First up is Maria. Hiding Sobinsky in her apartment, she is summoned in to see Siletsky, who wants both to convert her to the Nazi cause and to sleep with her (the line between these two objectives being somewhat blurry, we feel, in his mind). She puts him off for a few hours, enough time to hatch a plan with Joseph and the troupe – she will play along, and they will lure Siletsky out of the safety of the Gestapo HQ, and murder him. That the idea of murder is treated neither as comic nor exceptional is an indication of how matter-of-factly To Be will address its wartime setting. It is unrelenting in its pursuit of a laugh – the troupe’s sole Jewish member (Felix Bressart) has as his tagline an approving it will get a big laugh, and much as he is shouted down by his more austere brethren, Lubitsch himself endorses the sentiment – but the comic elements are quite carefully placed within the space allowed them by the surrounding bleakness. Just so, when Maria returns to Siletsky and he bullies her into a kiss she does not, as an actress in another film might, try to preserve her honor with coyness. She kisses him right back and says Heil Hitler. She takes serious things seriously.
So they murder Siletsky, after a lot of business that involves Joseph disguising himself as the local Gestapo chief. It’s interesting to contrast Joseph with his wife. Both he and Maria act, but she acts only as herself, and she’s good at it. Joseph on the other hand is always posing as someone else, and he’s bad at it, because his true self keeps intruding. He’s seized both by his own neuroses and jealousy (he’s still burning up over the young pilot), and by his contempt for the Nazis he is playing against. Yet one of the film’s ironies is that Joseph’s deficiencies only make his portrayals more accurate – as a Nazi he is bungling and awkward; and the Nazis we meet are, the urbane Siletsky excluded, bungling and awkward.
With Siletsky dead Joseph assumes his identity and goes to meet with the Gestapo chief whom earlier he had impersonated (you follow, right?), one Colonel Ehrhardt (Sig Ruman). To Be was not well reviewed when it came out: it was accused of making light of the depravity of Nazism, and the Ehrhardt character was often at the center of these critiques. Ruman, a master of bluster, plays Ehrhardt at full bluster. He is stupid, cowardly, not in any sense a true believer – the butt of the film’s joke. But to see him as only a figure of fun is to miss the point. We see as well, and clearly, that he is a mass murderer, and near the end of the film he intends to rape Maria. Tritely, his character demonstrates the banality of evil. More provocatively, and perhaps more accurate to the spirit of Lubistch, he demonstrates the evil of the banal. Beyond that, while the film’s Nazis are dumb and brutish, both lumpen and in their unsuave careerism hideously bourgeois, to say that they are thus being portrayed as somehow unthreatening, too incompetent to effect the evils they are guilty of, is I think a case of intellectuals overvaluing their own attributes. These Nazis are easily fooled by the paper-thin deceptions of the theatre troop – they are too literal in their thinking to disbelieve their own eyes. But they are also determined, organized, afraid of authority – they would make bad reviewers but it’s not such a stretch to imagine them doing evil things at scale.
Once the Gestapo are engaged the setups begin to pay off, and the final few sequences of the film are as frenzied and anarchic and controlled as a well-calibrated bombardment. Each theme is given its chance at apotheosis; and the Hitler impersonator in particular is put through a dazzling set of paces. When Ehrhardt menaces Maria in her apartment the film contrives to have its faux-Hitler walk in on them; Ehrhardt, thinking that he has unwittingly cut in on the Der Fuhrer’s action, shoots himself. It’s a powerful joke, in the way that it opens up for a moment a window into a parallel world, both more absurd and less awful than our own, in which Hitler is out hustling after ingenues, too busy on the make to attend to war and genocide.
In the film’s final scene Joseph is on stage, having escaped to England, reciting as he did earlier in the film Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Back in Warsaw the monologue’s opening phrase was a signal for Sobinksi to rise from his seat in the audience and head backstage to liaise with Maria – to be or not to be as erotic trigger. In England Sobinksi, put in his place by the Turas’ competent bond, stays seated. Another youth, however, rises. And thus the set-ups continue to pay off, past the roll of the credits. Life goes on even as it has been dislocated.
