To Be or Not to Be
Aug. 13th, 2008 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWatched a movie tonight, a comedy from the 1940s called To Be or Not to Be. It’s directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who is made of a hundred different types of brilliant and ought to be as famous as Hitchcock but isn’t because Hitchcock was a tireless self-promoter while Lubitsch was an artist.
No, I do like Hitchcock. But Lubitsch is quite wonderful; he directed The Shop around the Corner, which got remade as You’ve Got Mail, and Ninotchka, which is Greta Garbo as a severe Soviet commissar who visits Paris to retrieve some of the Romanov’s jewels and ends up falling for a man who is either a playboy or a gigolo, or some combination thereof, because he appears to be getting all his money from an older woman. Who happens to be Russian ex-nobility.
Lubitsch is funny and sophisticated and as sexy as forty movies get. (In To Be or Not to Be, the heroine analyzes a man’s handwriting. “I do hope you live up to your Y’s,” she says, looking at the long, swooping tail of the Y.) He also made a movie, Design for Living, about a ménage a trios.
I’ve heard To Be or Not to Be described as a dark comedy, which I think describes the reaction of audiences in the forties more than now. A comedy about Hitler’s invasion of Poland is shocking when there are Nazis marching through Warsaw, but now we have The Producers and To Be or Not to Be is just funny.
Speaking of The Producers: To Be or Not to Be totally had the “Heil myself” line first. I feel confident saying that Mel Brooks stole it outright, because Mel Brooks made a remake of To Be or Not to Be in 1983.
Anyway, the point of this—there was a point to all this—is that To Be or Not to Be is a brilliant and hilarious film by a wonderful director. My favorite character is Jack Benny as Josef Tura, an actor who thinks he’s brilliant (when he’s incognito, he can’t help but ask everyone he meets if they’ve heard of “that great, great Polish actor, Josef Tura.” A Nazi official replies: “What he did to Shakespeare is what we’re doing to Poland.”). Good stuff.
No, I do like Hitchcock. But Lubitsch is quite wonderful; he directed The Shop around the Corner, which got remade as You’ve Got Mail, and Ninotchka, which is Greta Garbo as a severe Soviet commissar who visits Paris to retrieve some of the Romanov’s jewels and ends up falling for a man who is either a playboy or a gigolo, or some combination thereof, because he appears to be getting all his money from an older woman. Who happens to be Russian ex-nobility.
Lubitsch is funny and sophisticated and as sexy as forty movies get. (In To Be or Not to Be, the heroine analyzes a man’s handwriting. “I do hope you live up to your Y’s,” she says, looking at the long, swooping tail of the Y.) He also made a movie, Design for Living, about a ménage a trios.
I’ve heard To Be or Not to Be described as a dark comedy, which I think describes the reaction of audiences in the forties more than now. A comedy about Hitler’s invasion of Poland is shocking when there are Nazis marching through Warsaw, but now we have The Producers and To Be or Not to Be is just funny.
Speaking of The Producers: To Be or Not to Be totally had the “Heil myself” line first. I feel confident saying that Mel Brooks stole it outright, because Mel Brooks made a remake of To Be or Not to Be in 1983.
Anyway, the point of this—there was a point to all this—is that To Be or Not to Be is a brilliant and hilarious film by a wonderful director. My favorite character is Jack Benny as Josef Tura, an actor who thinks he’s brilliant (when he’s incognito, he can’t help but ask everyone he meets if they’ve heard of “that great, great Polish actor, Josef Tura.” A Nazi official replies: “What he did to Shakespeare is what we’re doing to Poland.”). Good stuff.
