To Be Or Not To Be (1942) Was Ahead of Its Comic Timing

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by Franco Asmaeil, who actually earned a subscriber request back in 2021, but I promised him a second one. I can’t really remember why I made such a promise, but he’s done me many a kindness over the years, so trust that there are plenty to pick from. Also, he kinda needs something to cheer him up, as his Warriors are on the verge of an early playoff exit. (Don’t worry, he’s a Bay Area native, not a bandwagoner, at least.) Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

There have been many game-changing shifts in the film industry over the last century or so. Obvious things like the advent of the sound era or the dawn of the blockbuster or the development of CGI may come to mind. But when you look below the surface, past the technological advancements and such, some of the more interesting shifts have to do with our cultural attitudes.

As I was watching To Be Or Not To Be, I was constantly thinking about the fact that this was a film about World War II, released in the middle of World War II. And less than three months into the United States’ involvement in the war at that.

But this film is not an outlier in that way. If you’re a fan of classic cinema, you know that there was a damn glut of WWII films released while the war was ongoing. According to Wikipedia, the United States released 31 films either about or tangentially regarding WWII even before our involvement ratcheted up in 1942.* Then there were 38 in 1942 alone.** Then a whopping 56 in 1943! And then only 43 more in 1944, followed by a mere 22 in 1945.

If you’re bad at math, that’s 190 WWII films, just in the United States, released (or produced) during the war itself. (There are, of course, many others made by other countries and/or released after the war ended.)

Reader, I find this fascinating. We’re talking about one of the most harrowing global conflicts in modern history. And yet, people didn’t go to movie theaters to escape from the news back then—they went to embrace the news, even if it was in a fictional form.*** War became our entertainment, even (or perhaps especially) when it began to hit home for Americans.

We’re all the way on the other side of that spectrum by now, aren’t we? When the (still present) COVID-19 pandemic was really raging for a couple years, the last thing most of us wanted was to see movies and TV shows about the reality we were living through. That’s largely still the case.**** And while it’s not a one-to-one comparison, the list of films about the Iraq War totals just 61. That’s from any country and any year.***** And only 16 of those were released during the first five years of that war.****** (My editor John pointed out that there were lots of films and series during this time that featured vaguely Middle-Eastern terrorist groups, though.)

Let’s go back to 1942, when To Be Or Not To Be hit the silver screen. Because unlike most of the WWII films released during the war, this film is a comedy. Sure, it’s not the only comedy on the list—Abbott and Costello enlisted, Laurel and Hardy got drafted, even Bob Hope was in on the joke—but director Ernst Lubitsch deserves a bit more credit. He was pushing the comedic boundaries past funny guys joining the Army.

To Be Or Not To Be stars Carole Lombard and Jack Benny as a married couple performing with a Polish acting troupe in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. When they discover a Nazi plot that threatens their homeland, they use their acting powers to dupe the soldiers—including Colonel “Concentration Camp” Ehrhardt, the butt of one of the best running jokes—and squash their plans to derail the underground movement. (You wouldn’t know any of this from the strategically tame poster, though.)

It’s a pretty great comedic script, and it’s executed brilliantly by a terrific ensemble. But To Be Or Not To Be was released less than three months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Were American audiences ready to laugh in the face of…the Holocaust?

Not really, as it turns out. According to Wikipedia, many critics found the film to be in poor taste, and audiences simply couldn’t see the humor in such a real threat. But the best reaction came from Benny’s own father: According to Benny’s unfinished memoir, he was so disgusted to see his son in a Nazi uniform that he walked out of the theater…but when Benny convinced him to finish the film, he loved it. And apparently he saw it 46 times. (That’s some real dad business right there.)

I kinda get it, though. Most of us wouldn’t have reacted positively to, say, an Al-Qaeda comedy a year after 9/11, even if the obvious pitfalls were somehow avoided.******* But it speaks to the genius (and maybe even the bravery) of Lubitsch. Could it be that this director of German upbringing and Jewish ancestry was actually the perfect person to make such a film at such a time?

Given that the film is now hailed as a comedy classic, it seems that he was. We just needed to win the war before we could laugh about it.

*I wrote about one of those films, Foreign Correspondent, during a Hitchcock marathon in 2021.

**Joey Brown wrote about one of those films, Saboteur, just last fall. (Also a Hitchcock!)

***There were also the newsreels that debuted in 1909, of course, which were among the most popular ways to see and hear about current events before TVs became common in the 50s.

****That said, I did really like John Hyams’ COVID-19 slasher from earlier this year. (John tells me that Kimi is also very good!)

*****This list doesn’t include documentaries, and since that format is much more prevalent now than it was in the 1940s, I left them out too. Also because documentaries are often meant to educate rather than just entertain. (Look, I’m trying to be fair and balanced here.)

******After those first five years, 2008-2012 feels like the peak of Iraq War films, with Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker serving as the zenith.

*******I know this is the second newsletter in a row in which I’ve referenced 9/11. I promise I’m okay.

To Be Or Not To Be is now streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel.