Lieutenant this is the first time I've ever met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes.
In To Be or Not to Be (1942), Ernst Lubitsch revisits one of his recurring themes: the fluid border between role-playing and real life. The film begins with a scene in which Bronski (Tom Dugan), wearing Hitler’s uniform, appears in the streets of Warsaw. We later discover that he plays Hitler in a play and is challenged by his director, who complains that he does not look like him. So he goes out among people to prove the director was wrong. Then there is a scene at the Gestapo headquarters, when an officer tries to bribe a child to spy on his family. But Lubitsch soon tells us that our first impression was wrong again; we were watching the stage as the players practiced an upcoming play. Lubitsch primarily satirizes the characters without pointing out the organization's widely known brutality. He portrays the Gestapo not as monsters but as humans who are trying to cover up their incompetence with beast-like behavior.
The New York Times movie critic famously called the movie “bad taste.”
Later, there is a scene in a real Gestapo headquarters. Lubitsch was a genius in generating black comedy by juxtaposing the fake with the real. One reason his comedy does not lose its edge over time is that he does not take sides. He satirizes both sides. For instance, he demonstrates that the voracious appetite for sex is not exclusive to Germans, characters like Siletsky (the German spy in London) and Colonel Erhardt, and is also shared by two characters on the opposite side, Maria (Carole Lombard) and Sobinski (Robert Stack).
Apart from the first scene, Lubitsch presents two renditions of Gestapo headquarters. In the first one, we return to the theater stage, a false venue where we see a genuine German spy, Siletsky, conversing with a false headquarters commander, Joseph Tura (Jack Benny). The second iteration shows the real headquarters, where a false German spy, Tura, is with a genuine Gestapo commander, Colonel Ehrhardt. Lubitsch often includes a false element in a scene to undermine its authenticity; for instance, when Maria appears in elaborate clothes in a scene at the concentration camp.
The brutality that the Gestapo was famous for was a facade to cover up their lack of confidence.
By using the stage as the headquarters, Lubitsch suggests that people are performing to disguise their weaknesses, among them their insecurity. Colonel Ehrhardt’s pomposity is to cover up his lack of confidence. As noted earlier, Lubitsch extends the same theme to Joseph Tura as well. As Colonel Ehrhardt keeps blaming his assistant, Schultz, for whatever goes wrong, Tura is stuck with his own problem when someone leaves the play as he begins his soliloquy, "To be or not to be."
Lubitsch goes back to his favorite interplay of the stage persona and real life, finding the difference hardly noticeable.
Another critical aspect of the movie is its historical background of its genesis in 1941, when the tragic events of World War II were underway, a period that the Allies’ eventual victory was not yet clear. The movie’s production began in October of that year, even before the US entered the war. When the movie was screened in March 1942, the Allied forces were at a low point in the conflict. The bleak international outlook would certainly have influenced the movie’s reception among critics. Many critics failed to capture the movie’s message and struggled with the idea of making fun of large-scale destruction. The New York Times movie critic famously called the movie “bad taste.” The reactions to the movie changed over time; it is now considered one of Lubitsch’s masterpieces.
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