To Be or Not to Be

A theatre company in Warsaw. When the German occupation begins they have to turn their stage skills into resistance, playing Gestapo officers to save their own lives. Ernst Lubitsch directed. Carole Lombard and Jack Benny star. The film opened just one month after Lombard died in a plane crash. The first reactions split. Critics condemned the satirical treatment of a grave subject. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times asked how audiences were supposed to accept a shattering air raid on Warsaw right after a sequence of farce. Others defended it as sophisticated entertainment. Lubitsch answered in a published response: what I have satirised in this picture are the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology. Its standing changed over time. Rotten Tomatoes now sits at 96 percent and Metacritic at 86. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek named it his favourite comedy and called it madness in the best sense. It entered the National Film Registry in 1996 and appears on the American Film Institute's list of the hundred greatest comedies. Who it is for: viewers who like black humour and classic Hollywood comedy. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot see the subject outside comedy. It was made in 1942, while what it depicts was still going on, and that discomfort never entirely dissolved.