To Be or Not to Be

The real To Be or Not to Be is a 1942 black comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. It’s about a troupe of Polish actors in 1941 Warsaw who become reluctantly but heroically involved in a spy plot when the Nazis threaten to destroy the Polish underground.

That doesn’t sound like an especially hilarious plot, and empty-headed whimsy it’s not. But it’s really funny, all the more so for being exciting and touching and bold. It’s astonishing that the film was made in 1942 because it’s such a strange mixture of farce and horror.

It did seem controversial at the time, but now the movie is an established classic. And that means it’s ripe for the remake treatment. A remake of To Be or Not to Be would have demanded a delicate balance of moods, a discreet but daring sensibility, the ability to orchestrate humor and emotion with a gentle hand.

Well, Mel Brooks got there first, folks. And a line from the original film – which gets repeated verbatim in the remake – comes to mind. A Gestapo chief makes an equation that refers to the “great” Polish actor, Frederick Bronski. “What he does to Hamlet,” the chief says, “we are doing to Poland.” And what the Nazis did to Poland, Mel Brooks has done to To Be or Not to Be.

The Brooks version sticks pretty close to the original, although there are a few musical numbers stuck in. In one of them, Brooks plays a dancing Hitler, but he did this kind of thing much better in his 1967 film The Producers, which featured Dick Shawn as Der Fuehrer in that unforgettable Broadway production, Springtime for Hitler.

Broks and Anne Bancroft (husband and wife in real life) play Poland’s leading thespians, Frederick and Anna Bronski. They get dragged into a plot to stop a Polish double agent (Jose Ferrer) from exposing members of the underground movement. Complicating matters is a buffoonish Gestapo man, “Concentration Camp” Erhardt (Charles Durning) and his henchman (Christopher Lloyd), who keep falling over each other in their attempts to foil the Bronskis’ ploys.

This kind of black comedy has to be done razor-sharp or it won’t work at all. Here, most the gags aren’t funny, and they’re also very strange. There’s an anger behind Brooks’ jokes about concentration camps and firing squads that is legitimate, but the humor here is so sloppily realized that the movie has a weird, off-balance quality. Some of the jokes don’t merely die, they turn the stomach.

Brooks produced the movie, but he didn’t actually take a writing or directing credit. That’s a change from his usual method of doing everything himself. Maybe he should go back to doing it all, in his own anarchic way. Whatever he decides to be (or not to be) next, I’m putting down money that it’ll be better than this ill-advised project.

First published in The Herald, December 16, 1983

The director was Alan Johnson, a longtime choreographer who worked frequently with Brooks. Yeah, this didn’t work.