To Be or Not to Be - Carole Lombard's final film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

For Carole & Company's "Carole-tennial (+3)," marking the 103rd anniversary of Hollywood legend Carole Lombard's birth, I'm taking a look at my favorite Carole Lombard film, director Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). This was Lombard's last film, released just a month after her death.

'The Lubitsch Touch' has been dissected and analyzed for decades. Billy Wilder, who had been protégé to director Ernst Lubitsch early on, put it succinctly: "The Lubitsch Touch is a light touch. But there are serious overtones in Lubitsch. He understood life..."

In 1941, Lubitsch signed a three year contract with Paramount Pictures. But first he had another commitment to fulfill with United Artists. To Be or Not to Be was part of Lubitsch's arrangement with UA.

Though the original story for the film was mostly Lubitsch's, the project that evolved was something of a departure for the director. As he later remarked, "I was tired of the two established recognized recipes, drama with comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief. I had made up my mind to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time."

To Be or Not to Be is a comedy both black and broad; it is also a sophisticated and razor sharp satire on the Nazis.

Actors...and Nazis, To Be or Not to Be

Lubitsch chose radio superstar Jack Benny for the male lead. Benny, who later observed that it was "impossible for comedians like me and [Bob] Hope to get good directors - that's why we made lousy movies," considered Lubitsch "the greatest comedy director that ever lived" and was eager to work with him. Though Miriam Hopkins was up for the role of Benny's onscreen wife, she was only interested in taking the part if it was enlarged for her. Jack Benny was meanwhile pushing for Carole Lombard in the role. One night Benny and producer Alexander Korda went out on the town together; much drinking ensued and the upshot was that Korda wired UA and asked the studio to hire Lombard.

Lubitsch and Lombard knew each other from her early days on the Paramount lot. While the director had made pictures with the other great Paramount leading ladies, Claudette Colbert and Marlene Dietrich, he and Lombard had never managed to work together. Lombard's husband, box office king Clark Gable, was not excited about To Be or Not to Be and referred to Lubitsch as "the horny Hun." But Lombard had always wanted to work with the director and signed on; her only special request was that Irene design her wardrobe.

The production had its share of problems. To begin with, Jack Benny was jittery. According to co-star Robert Stack, he was "scared to death." Benny's source of discomfort was that while he knew how to deliver his lines on stage and on radio, he didn't know what to do when it came to a movie set. This made him very nervous.

Another problem concerned musical director Miklos Rozsa. Rozsa was set to score the film but once he saw the script and realized it was a satire on Nazism, he refused; he just didn't see the humor.

Carole Lombard and Robert Stack on the set

Regardless of these and other difficulties, the atmosphere on the set was a happy one. Lombard developed a habit of driving in from Encino, even when she wasn't scheduled, just to watch Lubitsch at work. According to Jack Benny, "Everyone was in awe of him."

To Be or Not to Be opens in Warsaw, Poland, just before the Nazi invasion. A man who appears to be Adolf Hitler is walking the streets, creating a stir.  The man, it turns out, is not Hitler but a local actor named Bronski (Tom Dugan) who is about to portray Adolf Hitler in an anti-Nazi play; he is testing his believability in public.

The plot centers on the acting troupe Bronski is part of, the Theatre Polsky, and its two stars, Josef and Maria Tura (Benny and Lombard). The troupe is rehearsing an anti-Nazi play, Gestapo, but is forced to revert to a less controversial drama, Shakespeare's Hamlet. A running gag concerns Maria, who is carrying on with a young pilot (Robert Stack). Whenever Josef begins Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy on stage, Maria's eager young man conspicuously shuffles out of his theater seat to meet her. The walk-out of an audience member in the midst of this speech completely flusters the actor (who has no idea why the man has left). Josef Tura's Hamlet is heavy on the ham and, as one Nazi character remarks, "What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland." The troupe eventually becomes involved with the Polish resistance.

Lombard is well-matched with Benny, who was never better and never had a better role. The two shared exquisite timing and much panache, and their scenes together could be shown in a master class on playing comedy. The fine ensemble cast includes venerable Felix Bressart (as an actor relegated to "spear carrier" roles but who has his moment to quote Shakespeare, eloquently) and Lionel Atwill along with Sig Ruman, Stack and Dugan.

Billy Wilder elaborated on another aspect of Lubitsch's genius, "The Lubitsch Touch is the superjoke. You have a joke, and then you don't expect the joke on top of the joke that tops the first one. The joke you didn't expect is funnier than the one you expected..."

The sequence below ends with one of Lubitsch's great "toppers." Sig Ruman's character (aka/'Concentration Camp Ehrhardt') is a Nazi colonel with a habit of blaming his own mishaps, mistakes and misunderstandings on his inept second-in-command, Captain Schulz. In this scene, the "topper" is Ehrhardt's final exclamation, a late addition to the script by Lubitsch...

Sig Ruman, Carole Lombard (and Tom Dugan) in To Be or Not to Be

The picture wrapped just before Christmas 1941, and Carole Lombard promised Jack Benny she would guest on his radio show once she returned from an upcoming war bond drive. But on the evening of January 16, 1942, the plane returning Lombard and her mother from the bond drive, along with 20 others, crashed into a mountain west of Las Vegas. All aboard were killed. Apparently the pilot had changed course, flying toward Las Vegas rather than his official destination, Boulder, Colorado. The plane had almost missed the mountain peak, crashing only 120 feet from the top.

To Be or Not to Be premiered on February 15, 1942. It was not a hit. Some critics claimed Lubitsch had suffered a lapse in taste. Churlish Bosley Crowther of the New York Times accused the director of  going for cheap laughs. Robert Stack later said that the press of the time just didn't get it. He noted that Lubitsch was "a Jew from the Old Country himself" and declared that To Be or Not to Be was the best satire on Nazism ever made.

Lubitsch was appalled that his intent and his taste were both misinterpreted and maligned. He acknowledged that he hadn't depicted Nazi terror in the typical way with outright violence, "My Nazis are different; they passed that stage long ago. Brutality, flogging and torture have become their daily routine. They talk about it the same way as a salesman referring to the sale of a handbag."

Lombard and Lubitsch

It isn't surprising that critics and audiences of early 1942 may not have warmed to or understood Lubitsch's approach. The country had suffered Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and entered World War II just as the production of To Be or Not to Be was coming to an end. Those early days of the war were deeply patriotic times in the U.S. and the outcome of the conflict was still far from certain. Other wartime movies generally presented a more traditional portrait of our enemies and their victims - unequivocal, distinctly unfunny and in stark black and white terms.  Lubitsch's witty satire had arrived in American theaters at the wrong moment. But the passage of time has been kind to To Be or Not to Be. It long ago entered the pantheon of Lubitsch's great masterworks - that very special place where Ninotchka (1939) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940) also abide.

Carole Lombard, a natural as vain but appealing Maria Tura, was never more elegant or disarming. Though her character is clearly 'a woman of affairs,' Lombard endows her with so much warmth, humor and humanity that Maria is never less than entirely sympathetic. Such was Lombard's irreplaceable talent.


To learn more about Carole & Company's "Carole-tennial (+3)" blogathon and participating blogs, click here...

Carole Lombard, 1908 - 1942

References:

Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise by Scott Eyman

Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler

Read More

Light, Shadow and Synergy ~ von Sternberg and Dietrich, Part III

Scroll down for Parts I and II of Light, Shadow and Synergy...

In 1933, during a hiatus between studio contracts and filmmaking, Josef von Sternberg traveled to Germany to explore establishing Marlene Dietrich and himself at UFA, the studio where the two had made The Blue Angel three years earlier. Just as the director was returning to the U.S., recently appointed Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler suspended the German constitution and soon began revoking the citizenship of Jewish artists and scholars; not much later came the burning of books. Back in America, von Sternberg, an Austrian Jew, and his star signed on once more with Paramount where the director's new contract gave him almost complete autonomy over his films.

He later wryly reflected on his next (and last) two productions with Dietrich, “I completely subjugated my bird of paradise to my peculiar tendency to prove that a film might well be an art medium…”

Of the first of these, The Scarlet Empress (1934), von Sternberg recalled, “The film was, of course, a relentless excursion into style…the tapestry of the Russia of Catherine the Great was evoked in all its grandeur, though it was a re-creation not a replica…” 

The Scarlet Empress



"Based on a diary of Catherine II," von Sternberg’s re-creation follows the life of innocent young princess Sophia of Germany who is summoned to the Russian court to wed Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe), a lunatic. Eventually adept at palace politics, the disillusioned royal wife (now called Catherine) becomes increasingly detached and power-obsessed, ultimately and victoriously seizing the throne in a coup. Along the way, she also becomes a powerful seductress whose countless lovers include a great number of soldiers in the Russian Army.

Von Sternberg’s re-imagining of events was so opulent and unusual that audiences and critics may have been put off by its byzantine iconography, Grimm’s Fairytale-esque characters and overt eroticism. The Scarlet Empress was unlike any of the many other Hollywood-produced historical spectacles of the era. Critic Robin Wood suspected that "ironic tragedy and a kind of macabre farce" were so closely bound within the tone of the film that audiences and critics simply weren't ready for it.

The Devil is a Woman (1935), reveals von Sternberg and Dietrich at the pinnacle of their partnership, though it, too, failed to connect. Von Sternberg, uncompromisingly expressive, produced a masterwork - audiences and critics and foreign governments be damned...
 

The Devil is a Woman

The film begins in turn-of-the-century Spain at the outset of a carnival. Arriving on the scene is exiled freedom fighter Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero) who flirts with Concha Perez (Dietrich), the local femme fatale. A tryst is arranged but before they meet Galvan encounters old friend Don Pasqual (Lionel Atwill) who relates in humiliating detail, told in flashback, how his enchantment with Concha ruined him. Pasqual makes the younger man promise not to see Concha again but Galvan and the woman do meet and this sparks a duel between the two men. Concha and Galvan run away together but Concha proves to be...capricious.

The Devil is a Woman is a visual carnival. Von Sternberg saturates the screen in every scene with layer upon layer of filigree and texture (streamers, confetti, balloons, masks, scarves, veils, mantillas, sequins, bouquets, shutters, screens, baskets, stairways, archways, ironwork, birds, horses, sheep, trees, rain, mist, plumes of smoke). It is also a witty flamenco demonstrating the futility and absurdity of enslavement to superficial beauty and romantic ideals. Strains of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Capriccio Espagnol" punctuate this cruel and ironic tableau...

Dietrich portrays Concha, the spoiled and wily coquette, with an operatic flamboyance reflected in every gesture and inflection, in her makeup, costumes and coiffures. Lionel Atwill is at his best, and most notice that his performance as Pasqual is an artful take on von Sternberg himself. Cesar Romero is charming as the younger fool; Edward Everett Horton is a droll choice as the local governor.

As the production was ending, von Sternberg wrote a note to Dietrich about their final film, "My parting gift to you will be the greatest "Dietrich film" yet. In it, I give you all my talent. You will see the ultimate Dietrich and it will be your favorite of our seven films."

In the end, it was Dietrich's favorite film, not just among those she made with von Sternberg but of all her films; she felt it contained her best performance and showcased her at her most beautiful. But, she also remembered, “Josef von Sternberg’s decision, against my will, to terminate our collaboration – to which the studio executives probably also contributed – marked for me the beginning of a long series of mediocre films.”



Destry Rides Again

Dietrich, whose screen goddess persona became more fixed and formal (her daughter observed that her mother's image was no longer recreated but simply perpetuated), managed to rebound. In her autobiography Dietrich wrote that, in 1939, producer Joe Pasternak called her to say he was willing to take a risk and make a picture with her (she was by now "box office poison"). When told it was a Western, her instinctive reaction was to turn it down. However, she wrote, “Josef von Sternberg advised me to take the offer.” Her comeback in Destry Rides Again (1939) was one of the most dramatic in Hollywood history and she went on to become an enduring legend.

The Shanghai Gesture

Von Sternberg directed only a handful of films in his remaining career. Though a 1937 production of I, Claudius, starring Charles Laughton and Merle Oberon was promising, it was never completed; The Shanghai Gesture (1941) is the best known of his post-Dietrich films. The director's final film, Ana-ta-han (1953) was made in Japan, in Japanese with the director's own voice providing English narration.

Josef von Sternberg was fortunate enough to be "rediscovered" during his lifetime. The Devil is a Woman had become a "lost film." Pulled from circulation in 1935 under pressure from the government of Spain, all prints were thought to have been destroyed. But in 1959 the Venice Film Festival screened von Sternberg's own print; both film and filmmaker were showered with accolades. He became the subject of documentaries, wrote his idiosyncratic autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, and lectured on film at UCLA. Today his work is regularly studied in film programs and screened at festivals and retrospectives around the world.

Dietrich would always give von Sternberg full credit for her success, “I was nothing but pliable material on the infinitely rich palette of his ideas and imaginative faculties.”

Von Sternberg's assessment was slightly different, “I did not endow her with a personality that was not her own…I gave her nothing that she did not already have. What I did was to dramatize her attributes and make them visible for all to see...”


von Sternberg, Oberon and Laughton

Released this August by Criterion, 3 Silents by Josef von Sternberg  - the set includes his signature work of the late silent era - Underworld (1927), The Last Command (1928) and Docks of New York (1928).

Read More