To Be or Not to Be

EN

“Based as it is upon the actor, the mise-en-scène shines through above all else in the direction of actors. Their body language, their manner of speaking, of moving through the shot, confirm Lubitsch as one of the greatest directors. Carole Lombard’s marvelous expressions or Jack Benny’s extraordinary impressions of a mutt with wounded pride reveal a profound understanding of the actor’s art and its possibilities.”

Jean Eustache1

 

“Concentration camp jokes? In 1942? Critical response to the film was subsequently harsh, most famously in the painfully humorless comments of Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: ‘To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case,’ for example. But to such reactions Lubitsch himself responded in a follow-up piece. ‘I am accused of three major sins,’ he writes, ‘of having violated every traditional form in mixing melodrama with comedy-satire or even farce; of endangering our war effort in treating the Nazi menace too lightly; and of exhibiting extremely bad taste in having chosen present-day Warsaw as a background for comedy.’ He goes on to brilliantly make a case for the film and its humor, stating, quite rightly, what matters most: ‘One might call it a tragical farce or a farcical tragedy – I do not care and neither do the audience. The picture plays – and that's the only important thing in this issue.’”

Jeremy Carr2

• 1

  Peter Goldberg, “Translation | Jean Eustache on Ernst Lubitsch,” MUBI Notebook, 27 February 2024.

• 2

  Jeremy Carr, “Close-Up on ‘To Be or Not To Be’: Lubitsch Answers the Question of ‘What's So Funny About the Nazis?’,” MUBI Notebook, 29 July 2015.