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February 7, 2012 (XXIV:4) , TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942, 99 min.)

Directed and produced by Ernst Lubitsch Original story by Melchior Lengyel Ernst Lubitsch Screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer Original Music by Werner R. Heymann Cinematography by Rudolph Maté by Production Design by

Selected for the National Film Registry, 1996.

Carole Lombard...Maria Tura Jack Benny...Joseph Tura ...Lieut. Stanislav Sobinski Felix Bressart...Greenberg Lionel Atwill...Rawitch ...Professor Siletsky Sig Ruman...Col. Ehrhardt Tom Dugan...Bronski Charles Halton...Producer Dobosh 1932 Trouble in Paradise, 1932 , 1932 George Lynn...Actor-Adjutant , 1931 The Smiling Lieutenant, 1930 Monte Henry Victor…Capt. Schultz Carlo, 1928 The Patriot, 1927 The Student Prince in Old Maude Eburne...Anna Heidelberg, 1925 Lady Windermere's Fan, 1924 The Marriage Halliwell Hobbes...Gen. Armstrong Circle, and 1915 Zucker und Zimmt. Miles Mander...Major Cunningham EDWIN JUSTUS MAYER (November 8, 1896, New York City, New York – September 11, 1960, New York City, New York) ERNST LUBITSCH (January 28, 1892, , Germany – has 48 Hollywood writing credits, among them 1958 The November 30, 1947, Hollywood, California) has 76 directing Buccaneer (1938 script), 1953 “Broadway Television Theatre” credits (some of which are 1948 , 1946 (play - “The Firebrand”), 1945 Masquerade in Mexico (story), Cluny Brown, 1943 Heaven Can Wait, 1942 To Be or Not to Be, 1945 A Royal Scandal, 1942 To Be or Not to Be, 1941 They Met 1941 That Uncertain Feeling, 1940 The Shop Around the in Bombay, 1941 Underground (story), 1940 Lucky Partners, Corner, 1939 , 1938 Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, 1937 1939 Rio, 1939 Exile Express, 1939 Midnight (story), 1938 The Angel, 1935 La veuve joyeuse, 1934 The Merry Widow, 1933 Buccaneer, 1936 Till We Meet Again, and 1932 Wild Girl. Design for Living, 1932 Trouble in Paradise, 1927 The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg, 1926 So This Is Paris, 1925 Lady WERNER R. HEYMANN (February 14, 1896, Königsberg, East Windermere's Fan, 1921 The Wildcat, 1919 The Doll, 1919 Prussia, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia) – May 30, 1961, Madame DuBarry, 1918 Carmen, 1915 Der letzte Anzug, 1914 Munich, Germany) composed the scores for 114 films, including Fräulein Seifenschaum) and 24 producer credits (1948 That Lady 1960 Bombs on Monte Carlo, 1956 Le chemin du paradis, 1955 in Ermine, 1946 Cluny Brown, 1946 Dragonwyck, 1945 A Royal Die Drei von der Tankstelle, 1955 Der Kongreß tanzt, 1950 Scandal, 1943 Heaven Can Wait, 1942 To Be or Not to Be, 1941 Emergency Wedding, 1950 A Woman of Distinction, 1949 A Kiss That Uncertain Feeling, 1940 The Shop Around the Corner, for Corliss, 1949 Tell It to the Judge, 1948 The Mating of Millie, 1939 Ninotchka, 1938 Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, 1937 Angel, 1947 The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, 1945 Hold That Blonde, 1936 Desire, 1934 The Merry Widow, 1933 Design for Living, 1945 Kiss and Tell, 1944 Three Is a Family, 1944 My Pal Wolf, Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—2

1944 Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, 1944 Hail the Bonnie Prince Charlie, 1942 Jungle Book, 1942 To Be or Not to Conquering Hero, 1944 Knickerbocker Holiday, 1944 Henry Be, 1941 Lydia, 1941 Major Barbara, 1941 That Hamilton Aldrich, Boy Scout, 1943 Appointment in Berlin, 1942 A Night to Woman, 1941 Old Bill and Son, 1940 The Thief of Bagdad, 1940 Remember, 1941 Topper Returns, 1940 One Million B.C., 1940 Together, 1939 The , 1939 The Spy in The Shop Around the Corner, 1939 Ninotchka, 1938 Bluebeard's Black, and 1938 Drums), and has art department credit for 15 Eighth Wife, 1934 Caravane, 1926 It's Easy to Become a Father, films (1964 The Yellow Rolls-Royce, 1952 Breaking the Sound 1926 A Sister of Six, 1926 Faust, and 1926 Die Brüder Barrier, 1952 Murder on Monday, 1949 , 1948 Schellenberg. The Fallen Idol, 1947 An Ideal Husband, 1939 The Four Feathers, 1939 , 1938 Drums, 1937 Murder on RUDOLPH MATÉ (b. Rudolf Mayer, January 21, 1898, Krakau, Diamond Row, 1936 The Man Who Could Work Miracles, 1936 Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Kraków, Malopolskie, Poland] – Rembrandt, 1936 , 1935 , October 27, 1964, Hollywood, California) has 71 and 1933 The Private Life of Henry VIII). cinematographer credits, some of which are 1947 The Lady from Shanghai, 1947 It Had to Be You, 1947 Down to Earth, 1946 ...Maria Tura (b. Jane Alice Peters, October Gilda, 1943/I Sahara, 1942 The Pride of the Yankees, 1942 To 6, 1908, Fort Wayne, Indiana – January 16, 1942, Table Rock Be or Not to Be, 1941 It Started with Eve, 1941 The Flame of Mountain, Nevada) appeared in 78 films. She was killed in a New Orleans, 1940 Seven Sinners, 1940 Foreign Correspondent, plane crash before To Be or Not to Be was released in 1942. 1940 My Favorite Wife, 1939 Love Affair, 1938 Trade Winds, Some of her other films were 1941 Mr. & Mrs. Smith, 1940 They 1938 The Adventures of Marco Polo, 1937 Stella Dallas, 1936 Knew What They Wanted, 1939 Made for Each Other, 1938 Come and Get It, 1936 Dodsworth, 1936 A Message to Garcia, Fools for Scandal, 1937 True Confession, 1936 My Man 1936 Charlie Chan's Secret, 1935 Metropolitan, 1935 Dante's Godfrey, 1936 Love Before Breakfast, 1935 Rumba, 1934 Inferno, 1933 The Merry Monarch, 1932 Monsieur Albert, 1932 Twentieth Century, 1934 Bolero, 1933 White Woman, 1933 Vampyr, 1932 Lily Christine, 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc, Supernatural, 1933 From Hell to Heaven, 1932 No Man of Her 1921 Lucifer, and 1920 Das Gänsemädchen. Own, 1932 No One Man, 1931 Ladies' Man, 1929 High Voltage, 1928 Me, Gangster, and 1927 My Best Girl. DOROTHY SPENCER (February 3, 1909, Covington, Kentucky – May 23, 2002, Encinitas, California) edit 73 films, among them JACK BENNY...Joseph Tura (b. Benjamin Kubelsky, February 1979 The Concorde... Airport '79, 1974 Earthquake, 1972 14, 1894, Chicago, Illinois – December 26, 1974, Holmby Hills, Limbo, 1971 Happy Birthday, Wanda June, 1969 Daddy's Gone , California) was best known as a comedian on radio A-Hunting, 1967 Valley of the Dolls, 1967 A Guide for the and television. He appeared in 46 TV series and films, among Married Man, 1966 , 1965 Von Ryan's Express, them 1972 “The Man”, 1971 “Kraft Music Hall Presents: The 1963 Cleopatra, 1960 , 1958 The Young Lions, Des O'Connor Show”, 1970 “The Kraft Music Hall”, 1964-1967 1957 A Hatful of Rain, 1956 The Best Things in Life Are Free, “The Lucy Show”, 1967 A Guide for the Married Man, 1950- 1956 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 1955 The Rains of 1965 “The Jack Benny Program” (251 episodes), 1963 It's a Mad Ranchipur, 1955 The Left Hand of God, 1955 Soldier of Fortune, Mad Mad Mad World, 1962 “Checkmate”, 1960 “The Slowest 1955 Prince of Players, 1954 Black Widow, 1954 Broken Lance, Gun in the West”, 1951-1957 “The George Burns and Gracie 1954 Demetrius and the Gladiators, 1954 Night People, 1952 Allen Show”, 1953-1957 “G.E. True Theater”, 1955 “The Jackie What Price Glory, 1947 The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1946 My Gleason Show”, 1955 “Four Star Playhouse”, 1953 “Omnibus”, Darling Clementine, 1946 Cluny Brown, 1946 Dragonwyck, 1945 The Horn Blows at Midnight, 1944 Hollywood Canteen, 1945 A Royal Scandal, 1945 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1944 1943 The Meanest Man in the World, 1942 George Washington Lifeboat, 1943 Heaven Can Wait, 1942 To Be or Not to Be, 1940 Slept Here, 1942 To Be or Not to Be, 1941 Charley's Aunt, 1938 Foreign Correspondent, 1940 , 1939 Artists and Models Abroad, 1937 Artists & Models, 1936 College Stagecoach, 1934 She Was a Lady, 1934 Such Women Are Holiday, 1934 Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, 1930 The Dangerous, 1934 Coming-Out Party, and 1929 Married in Medicine Man, and 1930 Chasing Rainbows Hollywood. ROBERT STACK...Lieut. Stanislav Sobinski (January 13, 1919, VINCENT KORDA (b. Vincent Kellner, June 22, 1897, Túrkeve, Los Angeles, California – May 14, 2003, Beverly Hills, Hungary – January 4, 1979, London, ) won a best art California) appeared in 95 films and TV series, among them direction Oscar for The Thief of Bagdad (1940). He was art 2001 “Butt-Ugly Martians”, 2001 “King of the Hill”, 2001 Killer director for 18 films (1962 The Longest Day, 1960 Scent of Bud, 1996 Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, 1991 “The Return Mystery, 1945 Vacation from Marriage, 1941 Major Barbara, of Eliot Ness”, 1990 “The Fanelli Boys”, 1990 Joe Versus the 1941 Old Bill and Son, 1940 The Thief of Bagdad, 1939 The Lion Volcano, 1989 Dangerous Curves, 1988 Caddyshack II, 1987 Has Wings, 1939 Clouds Over Europe, 1938/I Prison Without “Falcon Crest”, 1986 “Murder, She Wrote”, 1981-1982 “Strike Bars, 1938 The Challenge, 1937 , 1936 Men Force” (20 episodes), 1980 Airplane!, 1979 1941, 1976-1977 Are Not Gods, 1935 I Stand Condemned, 1934 The Rise of “Most Wanted” (22 episodes), 1968-1971 “The Name of the Catherine the Great, 1933 La dame de chez Maxim's, 1932 Game” (26 episodes), 1966 Is Paris Burning?, 1959-1963 “The , 1931 Längtan till havet, and 1931 Marius); Untouchables” (119 episodes), 1954 The High and the Mighty, production designer for 18 films (1960 Scent of Mystery, 1955 1952 Bwana Devil, 1951 Bullfighter and the Lady, 1942 To Be or , 1955 The Deep Blue Sea, 1955 Not to Be, 1941 Badlands of Dakota, and 1939 First Love. Summertime, 1954 Malaga, 1951 , 1948 Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—3

FELIX BRESSART...Greenberg (March 2, 1892, Eydtkuhnen, detailed biography The Lubitsch Touch, Lubitsch’s first film as East Prussia, Germany [now Chernyshevskoe, Russia] – March director-author-star was Fräulein Seifenschaum (Miss Soapsuds, 17, 1949, Los Angeles, California) appeared in 67 films, some of 1914), a slapstick one-reeler about a lady barber. Others maintain which were 1949 Take One False Step, 1948 Portrait of Jennie, that hid directorial debut was Blinde Kuh (Blindmans Buff), made 1948 A Song Is Born, 1946 The Thrill of Brazil, 1944 The the following year. By 1915, at any rate, Lubitsch was directing Seventh Cross, 1944 Song of Russia, 1942 To Be or Not to Be, most of the comedies in which he starred, and sometimes writing 1942 Mr. and Mrs. North, 1940 , 1940 The Shop them as well. In the evenings, nevertheless, he would appear in Around the Corner, 1939 Ninotchka, 1931 Kameradschaft, 1930 some topical sketch at the Apollo Theater and then go to eat at a Drei Tage Mittelarrest, 1930 Old Song, 1930 Three Good show-business cafe called Mutter Maentz’s. There he would Friends, and 1928 Love in Kuhstall. often stay until dawn, swapping anecdotes and wisecracks with his circle of Berlin wits, and puffing on his endless cigars. Ernst Lubitsch, from World Film Directors, Vol. 1, ed. John Lubitsch’s first big success as a director was Wakeman. H.W. Wilson Co, NY 1987 Schuhpalast Pinkus (Shoe Salon Pinkus, 1916). It was written German and American director, scenarist, producer, and actor, partly by Hans Kräly, soon to become the director’s regular born in Berlin. He was the son of Simon Lubitsch, a Jewish tailor scenarist, and starred Lubitsch not as a clownish Meyer or Moritz who owned a profitable men’s clothing store in the city. Ernst but as Solomon Pinkus, a bumptious young man-about-town. The Lubitsch was educated at the Berlin Sophien-Gymnasium. He following year and his temperamental new star acted in school plays and at sixteen announced that he wanted a persuaded a reluctant Lubitsch to direct his first career in the theatre. He was a small, clumsy, and homely boy serious drama (and first feature) (The and his father assured him he would be better off working in the Eyes of the Mummy Ma, 1918), starring Negri as a temple dancer family business. For a time Lubitsch had to accept this judgment, in ancient Egypt and as her fanatical pursuer. though he was so inept in the store that his father relegated him World War I ended soon after its release to the back office as a bookkeeper. Then and Berlin became a madhouse of inflation, he met and became the friend of the blackmarketeering, hunger riots, drug comic actor Victor Arnold, who tutored peddling, and every kind of prostitution him and helped him to find evening work and pornography. But the arts flourished as an actor and low comedian in Berlin and so did the escapist cinema, greatly music-halls and cabarets. In 1911, after a aided by the devaluation of the Reichsmark year of this hard training, Arnold (which meant production costs could introduced him to Max Reinhardt, who quickly be recovered if a film was sold hired him as a member of his famous abroad). company at the Deutsches Theater—a In this atmosphere Lubitsch made company that included Emil Jannings, his second film with “that temperamental Paul Wegener, Rudolph Schildkraut, Polish witch” Pola Negri. This was Albert Basserman, and , Carmen, adapted by Kräly and another among other great names. writer and told in flashback, with some Lubitsch was nineteen when he hand-tinted scenes. Released at the end of abandoned bookkeeping and became a 1918, it was voted the best German picture full-time actor. During the next year or so of the year and some years later was a he appeared in a variety of minor classical and other roles, and in success also in the (as Gypsy Blood). However, Jay one major one, as the hunchback clown in , and he Leyda, who saw it in 1967, found it devoid of Lubitsch’s traveled with the Deutsches Theater to Vienna, Paris, and characteristic wit and “film logic.” After directing two or three London. Beginning in 1912, he began to eke out his small salary comedy shorts (and starring in one of them, Meyer aus Berlin), as a property man and general dogsbody [a person who is given Lubitsch then embarked on another feature, Die boring, menial tasks to do] at the Bioscope film studios in Berlin. Austernprinzessin (, 1919). It had Ossi The following year he went to work as a comic actor for Paul Oswalda as the spoiled daughter of an American “oyster king” Davidson, one of Germany’s first cinema entrepreneurs. Having who sets out to buy a Prussian aristocrat for a husband, and built over fifty movie theatres, Davidson decided that it would be satirizes with equal good humor Prussian snobbery and American more profitable to make his own films than to rent those of materialism. Lubitsch thought it his “first comedy that showed others, and established the Union-Film production company. something of a definite style.” Another hit, it was followed by a Lubitsch’s first screen appearance was in the title role in Meyer drama called Rausch (Intoxication), based on Strindberg’s There auf der Alm (Meyer in the Alps, 1913). Thereafter he appeared in are Crimes and Crimes. a succession of short Union-Film comedies, often as the Paul Davidson, the entrepreneur behind all this, then archetypal Jewish dummkopf who makes good in the end, thanks decided that he should make “the greatest film of all time.” He to his indestructible optimism, good luck, and a winning way raised funds from UFA, the government-sponsored production with the ladies. company in which his Union-Film was already an important These comedies were very popular and successful, and element and put Lubitsch and Negri to work on Madame when the studio ran out of ideas, Lubitsch came up with some of Dubarry. Emil Jannings begged for and got the role of Louis XV, his own, offering his services as director into the bargain. and Lubitsch engaged over two thousand extras to fill his According to Herman G. Weinberg, author of the wonderfully carefully researched costumes and his studio-built Paris. The film Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—4 shows what he had learned from Reinhardt about the direction of Berlin, Lubitsch made one last film there, Die Flamme (1923), a crowd scenes and also his own unique talent as a “humanizer” of relatively small-scale story set in fin-de-siecle Paris about a history. Running over two hours, it was supplied with a specially cocotte (Negri) who falls in love with a composer (Hermann written score, played at the Berlin premiere by a full orchestra. It Thimig), loses him, and kills herself. It was released in the was a huge success in Germany, then all over Europe, and finally United States as Montmartre (1924), with an unsatisfactory in the United States. Some critics, it is true, objected to the happy ending tacked on the for public that “must have life as it presentation of the French Revolution as the outcome of an affair isn’t.” between a king and his midinette mistress. There was also some In December 1922, meanwhile, Lubitsch had committed resistance to the picture in the United States, even though its himself to that public. The “greatest director in Europe,” the distributor there, aware of the virulent anti-German feeling of the “European Griffith,” had been invited by “America’s time, had retitled it Passion and removed all traces of its German sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, who starred opposite Douglas origin from the credits (including Lubitsch’s name). Nevertheless Fairbanks in Lubitsch’s first American movie, Rosita (1923). It is with this film, as Andrew Sarris says, “Lubitsch almost an agreeable fantasy about a street singer in nineteenth-century singlehandedly lifted Germany into the forefront of film- Spain who attracts the attention of a libidinous king with a producing nations.” satirical song about him. Lubitsch and Pickford clashed After this triumph, Lubitsch demonstrated his versatility incessantly, personally and professionally, throughout the three in a string of successes for Union-UFA. Die Puppe (The Doll, months of filming, and the picture, perhaps because it gave 1919) is an E.T.A. Hoffman fantasy that makes audacious use of Pickford her first grown-up role. was not a financial success. all the movie camera’s capacity for visual trickery (and opens However, the critics, then and since, have praised it warmly as a with an extraordinary shot of puppet-master Lubitsch himself “distinguished and lovely film,” and Lotte Eisner was put in assembling a miniature set). Another hit (in spite of charges that mind both of Goya and of Sternberg’s later The Devil is a it was anti-clerical), it was followed by Kölhiesels Töchter Woman. (Kölhiesel’s Daughters, 1920), a peasant Taming of the Shrew As Gerald Mast says, Rosita “closed Lubitsch’s first shot on location in Bavaria, then by a screen version of Sumurun period”; after it, romanticism gave way to irony, the crowded (One Arabian Night, 1920, with Lubitsch repeating his stage canvas was exchanged for the telling detail. The move to performance (and vigorously overacting) as the hunchback clown Hollywood must have had something to do with this dramatic in love with a beautiful dancer (Negri). change of style; marital comedies were then in vogue, and (Deception, 1920), starring Jannings as Lubitsch no doubt learned from the achievements of Stroheim Henry VIII, was another spectacular essay on the influence of and De Mille in this genre. But by far the greatest influence on lust on history. Gerald Mast writes that if Dubarry “is Lubitsch at his time was Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923), convincingly eighteenth-century France, Anna Boleyn is even which tells its story about a provincial girl who becomes a “kept more magnificently convincing as Renaissance England. woman” with absolute moral detachment, great economy of Lubitsch’s control of lighting gives the wood of sets and the means, and brilliantly suggestive imagery. faces of people the glow of Renaissance painting.” At the same Much of what Lubitsch learned from Chaplin is already time, in this as in all his historical epics, Lubitsch sought to “de- evident in (1924), the first of five movies he operatize” and to “humanize” his characters: “I treated the made for a relatively new and still minor studio called Warner intimate nuances just as importantly as the mass movements and Brothers. It is a sophisticated comedy studying the collision tried to blend them both together.” Die Bergkatze (The Wildcat, between a hopeful new marriage (Florence Vidor and Monte 1921) is by contrast an anti-militaristic satire, unique among his Blue) and one that is failing (Marie Prevost and Adolphe films in that its bizarre sets and stylized acting were evidently Menjou). It impressed Iris Barry that Lubitsch “has shown, not influenced by expressionism (and, in its day, a complete failure). told, the story. Everything is visualized, all the comedy is in what The last and most elaborate of the historical spectacles the characters are seen or imagined to be thinking or feeling, in Lubitsch made in Germany was Das Weib des Pharao (The the interplay, never expressed in …[subtitles], of wills and Loves of the Pharaoh, 1922), which crowded the UFA lot with personalities….Gestures and situations, so lucidly presented that palaces and pyramids and many thousands of extras (at a total one is perfectly aware from the ‘pictures’ alone of what is cost, according to one account, of only $75,000). It is a movie on happening, give rise to other gestures and other situations the scale of Intolerance or Ben Hur and took almost a year to which—because of the permanence of visual memory—one make. There are notable performances from Jannings as the recognizes as the logical outcome of what has occurred before.” Pharao Amenes and Paul Wegener as the King of Ethiopia, who The New Yorker called it “a champagne picture in a beery movie go to war for the love of the beautiful slave girl Theonis (Dagny world.” Sevraes). In December 1921 Lubitsch paid his first visit to the In a moment of exasperation Mary Pickford had referred United States, taking The Loves of the Pharaoh with him. It to Lubitsch as a “director of doors,” and there is justice in the opened in New York a few months later and was hailed as “a charge. As Arthur Knight has pointed out, “prior to The magnificent production and stirring testimony to the genius of Marriage Circle, almost any decoration would do—either wholly Ernst Lubitsch.” nondescript for a routine film or, for a more elaborate production, Much interviewed in the United States, Lubitsch rooms choked with bric-a-brac and overstuffed chairs set off by expressed his admiration for Chaplin, Griffith, De Mille, loudly ornamental drapes and busy wallpaper. Lubitsch cleared Stroheim, and the American cinema in general, but with one away the clutter, providing clean playing areas for his action. The reservation: “The American moviegoing public has the mind of a advantages were so immediately apparent that they were twelve-year-old child: it must have life as it isn’t.” Back in incorporated into the majority of pictures from that moment on. Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—5

Few directors, however, have quite his ability to use settings to character and discloses the sentiments of the personages. With their fullest advantage. To Lubitsch, a door was always more Lubitsch a new art carried on the subtleties of Marivaux, and the than simply a way to get into or out of a room; it was a way to comedy of manners made its debut on the screen.” end an argument, to suggest pique or coquetry or even the sexual So This is Paris (1926) was another “sophisticated act itself. Corridors, stairways, windows—all had a dramatic comedy, full of marital complications petty jealousies, and function in the Lubitsch films.” humors of the married but otherwise unemployed,” and another Three Women (1924) is a harsher picture about a “lady- huge success for Warner Brothers. It captures the frenetic spirit killer” (Lew Cody) who plays mother (Pauline Frederick) against of the twenties in the sequence which shows us “a host of dance- daughter (May McAvoy)—the first for her money, the latter as a crazed revelers performing the Charleston. Like an animated recruit to his “harem.” It was the first of Cubist painting,…[Lubitsch’s] Lubitsch’s American films to be written by camera has caught the pulsating Hans Kräly, who had followed him to pandemonium of the scene, and the Hollywood and who was thereafter his tempo of his dissolving scenes has principal scenarist until 1928. Pola Negri the swing of a futuristic also arrived in Hollywood, and she starred rhapsody…. in (1924) as Catherine Lubitsch was then thirty- the Great of Russia, equally interested in four and one of the most admired power and virile young officers. The visual and successful film directors in the economy of this satire has been much world—some placed him second discussed—for example the officers’ revolt only to Griffith among Hollywood which is put down in three shots: the directors. According to Weinberg, general’s hand moving to his sword; the his directorial technique was chamberlain’s hand pulling out a “simple, direct, patient. He didn’t checkbook; the general’s hand releasing his believe in many rehearsals, feeling sword. The movie’s general air of mockery they tired the actor and robbed him extends to totally unrealistic sets and the of his spontaneity. If a scene had to deliberate anachronisms, which endow be done over several times, he eighteenth-century Russia with automobiles never lost his patience or and flashlights to underline the universality courtesy…. Sitting on a small camp of human frailty. chair, he would lean forward in his Lubitsch’s sexual comedies intensity…. And his face would always preserve this mood of sardonic but mirror all the emotions of the affectionate amusement at the dismal antics of his characters, and players, male or female. Sometimes he would jump up and show it was this, as much as the obliqueness of his innuendos, that an actor how to do a scene….Some directors liked to earned him his apparent immunity from censorship in both improvise—not he. It must all be down in the scenario, Germany and America. He demonstrates both qualities again and everything thought and worked out….Each scene has to ‘grow’ again in Kiss Me Again (1925), adapted from a Sardou farce and out of the preceding one; a film was a series of propulsions or starring Marie Prevost as a wife who wants to divorce Monte combustions, like an engine which keeps a vehicle going.” Blue in favor of a long-fingered pianist (John Roche). Much Because his scripts were “complete blueprints,” very little loved scenes include one in which Blue, to facilitate the divorce, footage was wasted; in effect his pictures were edited before they is urged by all concerned to strike his wife but cannot bring were shot. himself to do so; and the final scene in which Roche, awaiting By this time all the major studios were putting their his beloved (and unaware that she and her husband are directors to work on Lubitschean comedies, the master’s many reconciled), serenades her on the piano. Blue enters in pajamas imitators including Richard Rosson, Lewis Milestone, and and urges him to play more softly before hurrying back to the Malcolm St. Clair. Lubitsch himself was naturally much in marital bedroom. It was strokes like this, crystallizing in a single demand, and in 1926 he left Warner Brothers and, under the shot the whole essence of a (generally outrageous) situation, that auspices of MGM, returned to Germany to shoot exteriors for became known as “the Lubitsch touch.” Robert Flaherty, asked The Student Prince. Based on the operetta Old Heidelberg, this to name his favorite film, usually said it was Dovzhenko’s Earth was a shrewd “fusing of sentiment and highbred comedy,” because “that’s what they expect me to say.” But, he told charmingly played by Norma Shearer and Ramon Navarro Weinberg, “between you and me, my favorite film is Lubitsch’s (though according to Weinberg it was considerably “doctored” Kiss Me Again.” by the studio). The movie was chosen as one of the ten best of 1925; so Lubitsch’s next picture began his ten-year tenure at was Forbidden Paradise and so was Lubitsch’s adaptation of Paramount. The “German invasion” of Hollywood had continued Lady Windemere’s Fan: an unparalleled achievement. Lady and Emil Jannings was now on the scene. Lubitsch starred him in Windemere, as Ted Shane wrote, substituted Lubitsch’s “own The Patriot (1928) as the mad Czar Paul I….The Patriot, made great sense of cinematic wit and the dramatic” for Wilde’s on the eve of the advent of sound, was given a synchronized “perfumed sayings.”… Georges Sadou considered this musical score, together with some sound effects and occasional Lubitsch’s best silent film, full of “incisive details, discreet voices. ...Lubitsch’s own first talkie was touches, nuances of gestures, where behavior betrays the (1929), adapted by Ernest Vajda and Guy Bolton from a Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—6 successful play...and the cast included Jeanette MacDonald in her sumptuous Chevalier-MacDonald adaptation of the Lehar first screen role as the Queen of Sylvania, as operetta that failed to recover its costs. her bored and erring consort, Lupino Lane as his valet, and In November 1934, tired and a little shaken, Lubitsch Lillian Roth as the Queen’s maid (with Jean Harlow as an extra). acquired a new job as production chief at Paramount. He Lubitsch had his doubts about sound, but when it came supervised Sternberg’s The Devil Is A woman and Borzage’s he took to it with the greatest ease and panache. The Love Parade Desire, but in 1936 was abruptly replaced by William Le Baron. is witty in its dialogue, lavish in its settings, startling in its sexual Lubitsch’s own next film, Angel (1937), was his greatest failure. innuendos, and adroit in its introduction of songs…. Theodore Set in London and Paris in the mid-1930s, and with a cast headed Huff called this “the first truly cinematic screen musical in by as a neglected wife, Herbert Marshall as her America.”… oblivious husband, and Melvyn Douglas as an amorous bachelor, From time to time throughout his career, Lubitsch it builds its plot around the fact that the “salon” where Dietrich seems to have become dissatisfied with his court jester role and and Douglas meet is in fact an elegant brothel. Given the ever- to have set out to demonstrate a capacity for something more increasing puritanism of the period, this was a very nearly serious than sexual comedies. He did so in Rausch, The Patriot, impossible theme, but Lubitsch found ways of telling his story and Eternal Love, and he tried again with The Man I Killed without ever mentioning its real content…. (1932), adapted from a Maurice Rostand play by Sam This decline in Lubitsch’s reputation was halted by the Raphaelson and Ernest Vadja. It is a somber pacifist tract about a enormous popularity of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), his last young Frenchman who kills an film for Paramount. It has enemy soldier in World War I Gary Cooper as a much- and later goes to Germany to beg married American millionaire the forgiveness of the dead who finally succumbs to the youth’s parents. Adulated by the daughter (Claudette Colbert) critics, it failed at the box-office. of an impoverished French More recently, Andrew Sarris has marquis, and the brilliant suggested that the public knew dialogue was supplied by better than the critics—that the Charles Brackett and Billy film is “Lubitsch’s least inspired Wilder. The same team, and most calculated effort, all supplemented by Walter surface effect, all ritualistic piety Reisch, wrote Ninotchka toward a ‘noble’ subject.” (MGM, 1939), Lubitsch’s only At any rate, Lubitsch film with . She returned to his métier with One plays a dour and dedicated Hour With You (1932), a remake Soviet commissar sent to Paris with music of The Marriage to straighten out three Circle that apparently was comrades who have been directed by (credited only as dialogue director), seduced from the path of duty by capitalistic self-indulgence. She and followed it with Trouble in Paradise (1932). This meets an aristocratic French playboy (Melvyn Douglas) and masterpiece stars Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in a herself succumbs to Paris, glamour, and . Cheerfully totally amoral comedy about a couple of high-class thieves in satirizing both communism and capitalism (and thus Venice. The tone is set in the opening sequence, when a gondola antagonizing some Marxist critics), it is one of the wittiest and gliding through the moonlit canals is seen to be collecting also one of the warmest of Lubitsch comedies. It is not garbage; the gondolier throws a pail of slops aboard and launches particularly well endowed with “Lubitsch touches” but remains into a heartfelt rendition of “O Sole Mio.” There is never the perhaps the best loved of all his works, largely because of slightest hint that the protagonists might be redeemed by love or Garbo’s ineffable impersonation of a beautiful iceberg slowly anything else; they are thieves; never mind, they only steal from lighting up from within and melting into imperfect but irresistible the rich, and the rich are thieves too. Gerald Mast writes that “the humanity. Garbo herself once said that “Ninotchka was the only delights, the gags, the comic business, the brilliant dialogue, the time I had a great director in Hollywood.” technical grace and ingenuity of camera, cutting and sound have A leather goods and novelty shop in is the never been surpassed by any Lubitsch film”; many would agree. setting of The Shop Around the Corner (MGM, 1940). James It was the director’s own favorite among his pictures and marked Stewart is the head clerk, a salesgirl, and they the high point in his career. quarrel so much that they eventually realize they must be in love. For his screen version of Noel Coward’s Design for It is one of the few Lubitsch films not concerned with the antics Living (1933), Lubitsch set Ben Hecht to work rewriting of the rich and idle, and it is difficult to understand why it did not Coward’s dialogue, explaining that the play was too static for the fare better at the box office….That Uncertain Feeling (United cinema and that “things on the screen should happen in the Artists, 1941) was a disappointing and much altered remake of present,” not be recalled in conversation. This effrontery worried Kiss Me Again, translated from Paris to New York. contemporary critics, who also found Lubitsch’s cast (Frederic It was followed by the controversial comedy To Be or March, Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper) inferior to the soigné trio Not To Be (United Artists, 1942), in which a Warsaw theatre of the stage original (the Lunts and Coward himself). There was company during the Nazi occupation combines its work with a a mixed reception also for The Merry Widow (MGM, 1934), a little sabotage against the invaders. According to Theodore Huff, Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—7 the piece was called “callous, a picture of confusing moods, preparation of the script, and he worked so closely with his lacking in taste, its subject not suitable for fun-making.” It didn’t writers that they could seldom remember afterwards who help that it was released shortly after the death in a plane crash of contributed what to the finished product. Many of his writers its star, Carole Lombard. In fact, the film is rich in the kind of became close friends. , his favorite scenarist “black humor” that only became acceptable years later. Peter of the post-Kräly period, remembered him like this: “Lubitsch Bogdanowich wrote in 1972 that it “survives not only as satire loved ideas more than anything in the world, except his daughter but as a glorification of man’s indomitable spirits in the face of Nicola. It didn’t matter what kind of ideas. He could become disaster—survives in a way that many more serious and high- equally impassioned over an exit speech for a character in the toned works about the war do not.” current script, the relative merits of Horowitz and Heifetz, the In 1943 Lubitsch joined 20th Century-Fox as a producer- aesthetics of modern painting, or whether now is the time to but director, performing both functions for his first movie there, real estate. And his passion was usually much stronger than that Heaven Can Wait (1943)….It was Lubitsch’s first film in color, of anyone else around him, so he was likely to dominate in a which he used well enough to earn an admiring comment from group. Yet I never saw, even in this territory of egoists, anyone D.W. Griffith. In 1945 the director has his first heart attack while who didn’t light up with pleasure in Lubitsch’s company. We got working on a remake of Forbidden Paradise called A Royal that pleasure from the purity and childlike delight of his lifelong Scandal. took over and Lubitsch was credited as love affair with ideas….As an artist he was sophisticated, as a producer, though the film has nothing of his style. The same is man, almost naïve. As an artist, shrewd, as a man simple.” true of Dragonwyck (1946) of which he was also the nominal producer. Lubitsch went back to work in the spring of 1946. he produced and directed Cluny Brown, an excellent satire on English society with a fine cast headed by and Jennifer Jones and including Reginald Gardiner, C. Aubrey Smith, Peter Lawford, and other pillars of Hollywood’s “British Colony.” In 1947 Lubitsch began work on That Lady in Ermine, a screen version of an operetta starring . After a week’s shooting he became ill and Preminger again took over. Lubitsch died later the same year at the age of fifty-five. Theodore Huff defined the “Lubitsch touch” as a “swift innuendo or rapier-like ‘comment’ accomplished pictorially by a brief camera shot or telling action, to convey an idea or a suggestion in a manner impossible in words.” Lubitsch himself thought that “one shouldn’t single out ‘touches.’ They’re part of a whole. The camera should comment, insinuate, make an epigram or a bon mot, as well as tell a story. We’re telling stories with pictures so we must try to make the pictures as expressive as Ernst Lubitsch Laughter in Paradise. Scott Eyman. Johns we can.” Gerald Mast thought Lubitsch the American cinema’s Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Md, 2000. greatest technician after Griffith and wrote: his “art is one of Ernst and Vivian’s honeymoon trip stretched on. There omission….he consistently shows less than he might, implies was Vienna, where Ernst’s niece Evie had moved after her father more than he shows.” In this way Lubitsch “transformed landed a job with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer…In mid-April. melodramatic and sentimental tripe into credible human stuff and Lubitsch and his wife arrived in Moscow for what he said was a forged deeper into sexual desires, needs, frustrations and fears “purely private” visit. Vivian’s mother was Russian, her father than most of his contemporaries (and descendants) dared to go.” Swiss. Never having seen her mother’s homeland, she was Jean Renoir thought that Lubitsch “invented the modern curious. In Moscow, they were feted by Boris Shumyatski, head Hollywood.” of the Soviet Film Industry, but overall the trip was kept Robert E. Sherwood described the director as “an rigorously low-key….Ernst was staying at the Hotel Metropol extremely short, dark, thickset man, with ponderous shoulders and was overjoyed to see his old friend Gustav von Wanferheim, and huge, twinkling eyes.. In appearance he resembled a [an old colleague from the Reinhardt days who had acted for combination of Napoleon and Punchinello; in character he Ernst in his two Shakespearean pastiches]…Inge von combined the best features of each.” Lubitsch’s 1922 marriage to Wagenheim appraised Vivian as “a beautiful American WASP, Irma Kraus ended in divorce in the early 1930s. Some years later stiff and quiet, who appeared to have just thawed.” Ernst struck he married an Englishwoman, Sania (whom he called Vivian); her as “alert, lively, piercing…truly nice, without guile or they were divorced towards the end of World War II. Lubitsch pretension.”… had a daughter, Nicola, by this second marriage. He was a The conversation turned to the great Socialist hyperactive man who drove himself relentlessly, a gourmet, a experiment, and Inge von Wagenheim, a committed Communist, wit, and a practical joker; he never lost his music-hall German went into a long humorless diatribe. What was happening in accent nor relinquished the big black cigars that became his Russia, she declared, would be of enormous importance for the trademark. He loved to dance, and he played the piano and the entire world, and she failed to understand how a man of culture cello badly but with enthusiasm. and experience like Lubitsch could believe there was anything For Lubitsch, the crucial stage in making a film was the more important than the effort to build a new world. Certainly, Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—8 she said, “the dream machine lubricated by dollars” seemed a life?...Wilder, whose ambitions to direct would shortly be jump- paltry, insufficient world in which to spend one’s life. started by having Mitchell Leisen (“That fag who ruined my Ernst listened attentively, never even interrupting let scripts”) direct his material. Immediately fell into a alone contradicting, black eyes dancing, clearly growing more student/teacher relationship with Lubitsch, who taught him things and more amused. So this was what had replaced the dirt and he would remember the rest of his life. squalor of czarist Russia from which his father had escaped! He “His technique was totally subordinated to storytelling,” could understand why the lower and working classes preferred Wilder would remember, pacing back and forth in his office, life under communism—it held the promise of improvement. But occasionally stopping to whack his thigh with a riding crop. “His for an artist? theory—and mine—is that if you notice direction, you have At the end of the evening, Ernst grabbed his old friend failed. You have to hide your technique. No dolly shot should be by the arm and asked him bluntly, “Now tell me honestly, so overwhelming that you say, ‘My God, look at that.’ Look at Gustav, are you happy here?” the story, look at the characters, and make the technique become The answer was part of the action.” affirmative—von Wagenheim Beyond niceties like and his wife would only return to plot and character, Lubitsch Germany in 1945—but Lubitsch gave Wilder an underlying was clearly bewildered by his attitude, an aesthetic belief friend’s enthusiasm. system: let the audience write The evening was far the script with the filmmaker. from a total loss, however, for in “Don’t spell it out, like they’re the stentorian, mechanical- a bunch of idiots. Keep it just minded Inge von Wagenheim, slightly above their station. He Lubitsch discovered the matrix would not say to the audience, for the title character of what ‘Now listen to me, you idiots! would become his most famous Two plus two equals four! film: Ninotchka…. And three plus one equals The trip to Russia four! And one plus one plus disabused Lubitsch of any one plus one equals four!!! Big romantic feelings he might have deal. had about socialism in any form. “No. You give them Soon after his return, he told Salka Viertel, a screenwriter and two plus two and let them add it up. They’ll have fun and they’ll good friend of Garbo’s, to take his name off the roster of the play the game with you. Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, saying it was a tool of the “Lubitsch would have laughed if you had suggested Communists. As an alternative, beginning in October 1939, Ernst making a film with no cuts in it, or making a film with just ten became involved in a project called the European Film setups, like Hitchcock did in Rope. Those are exercises in Fund….Successful émigrés working in Hollywood would tithe masturbation and it would never occur to him. The living room between 1 percent and 5 percent of their pay to a central fund…. should never be shot through a fireplace unless it is form the point of view of Santa Claus and he’s a character in the film. Lubitsch returned to the Paramount lot, twenty-seven acres in the heart of Hollywood illuminated, at one time or “If the truth were known,” remembered Wilder, “he was another, by practically every famous name in movie history. By the best writer that ever lived. Most if the ‘Lubitsch touches’ this time, Paramount had assumed the realm of a cozy cocoon for came from him.”… Lubitsch, and for hundreds of others as well…. was born in Sucha, a small town one hundred miles east of Vienna, in As far back as 1929, Greta Garbo had been vocal in her 1906….Wilder moonlighted on movie scripts, including the enthusiasm for the idea of being directed by an artist, as opposed minor classic People on Sunday. Leaving Berlin after the to the craftsmen of various abilities who were employed at Reischstag fire (“It seemed the wise thing for a Jew to do”), he MGM. Specifically, she was enthusiastic about working with made his way to Paris, where a script he wrote attracted the either Lubitsch or Erich von Stroheim. In 1922, Louis B. Mayer attention of director Joe May. The script was never produced, but had dangled the possibility of borrowing Ernst from Paramount the money from the sale got wilder to Hollywood. After the usual to direct Queen Christina, which led Garbo to cable on April 1, period of adjustment, that is to say total and complete “Prefer Lubitsch, also happy for [Edmund] Goulding.” But Ernst impoverishment, Wilder landed at Paramount, where he once was too deeply involved in preparing Design for Living, which claimed to have made so little of an impression that he was began shooting in the first part of July. The tantalizing seriously studying the want ads. partnership had to be put off for a few more years. It was at that point that Paramount story editor Manny The story for Ninotchka had been brought to MGM in Wolf introduced him to Charles Brackett, a patrician from the 1937 by Gottfried Reinhardt, who was then working as an Eastern Seaboard.“From now on,” Wolf told them, “you’re a assistant to Sidney Franklin. Melchior Lengyel’s original story team.” At Wolf’s suggestion, Lubitsch took them on to write was obviously written with Garbo in mind but it is highly Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife… Lubitsch was enthralled. Where had conventional. Its springboard was a three-sentence memo this diminutive man with a slanted mind been all his scrawled in a notebook: “Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—9 ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets another intellectual New York playwright who had the bad luck romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad to write a scathingly contemptuous piece about movies, the after all.”… medium in which he would spend the better part of his working Work resumed on the script, and again Wilder and life. In an October 1923 issue of The New York Times, Mayer Brackett were called in to help…and to be amazed. “He wasn’t referred to Hollywood as “The abode of prosperous failure…the just a gagman,” remembered Wilder, “he was the best creator of retreat of intellectual beachcombers…the first refuge of a toppers. You would come up with a funny bit to end a scene, and scoundrel,..the capital of defeat…an outlet of stereotyped forms he would create a better one. I think he thought up the bit where and sentimental postures.” the picture of Lenin smiles back at Garbo, [but] I can’t be too At the time, Mayer could afford those lofty sentiments, for his sure. He would look at our stuff and go ‘Ho-ho, very good,’ and play about Benvenuto Cellini, The Firebrand, was about to open scratch out the next line. He’d read a bit more and go ‘Ho-ho, and be acclaimed as one of the ten best plays of the 1924-25 very good,’ and scratch out another line. What he did was purify, season….But by 1927 he was scavenging for jobs alongside the and that was what made him rest of Hollywood’s a great writer. intellectual beachcombers. and Walter Reisch, who As usual, Lubitsch chose his wrote a memo to MGM collaborator well. saying that all three writers “Eddie Mayer was a felt that Lubitsch was more far more sophisticated writer than entitled to a credit…. and man than Raphaelson,” remembered Geoffrey ….. In March 1941, Reinhardt. “Mayer was Ernst decided to return to the among the intellectuals, part security of the studios—and a of the clique around Herman steady paycheck—by signing Mankiewicz: Hecht and a three-year contract at 20th MacArthur, S. N. Behrman, Century-Fox. He planned to Louis Weitzenkorn and report to the lot by mid to late Mayer. In Europe it would summer, as soon as he had have been a coffeehouse his second United artists atmosphere. They all had wit. picture out of the way. It In Germany you had nobody wouldn’t be that simple. in films and hardly anybody To Be or Not to Be in the theater like that, except began life as the second Brecht, who had a political commitment under Lubitsch’s partnership with Sol Lesser. When horizon, which made him much too serious for a man like Ernst Lubitsch Productions was dissolved, United Artists gave Lubitsch.” the picture to , but that producer’s recent films Mayer’s script for To Be or Not to Be shares with The had been largely unsuccessful, leaving him unable to finance his Firebrand and Children of Darkness a sense of black comedy, of portion of the $1 million movie. The production was passed on to each character’s absurdity, with characterizations defined as . sardonic asides. All three scripts revolve around monstrous egos, Ernst and Korda had been acquaintances since the late 1920s, but there is a difference. Mayer’s plays are almost brilliantly when Alex had arrived in Hollywood and promptly served as the written, but they're metallic, lacking in humanity, cold. To Be or butt of one of Lubitsch’s practical jokes. … Not to Be is warm, and no matter how absurd “that great, great The original story for To Be or Not to Be derived largely from Polish actor” Josef Tura may be, there is something very needy, Lubitsch himself, although he worked in collaboration with very recognizably human in his actorish vitality. That was the Melchior Lengyel, who reported that “Writing for Lubitsch is true Lubitsch touch…. just kibitzing.” Ernst’s first impulse seems to have been to Lubitsch had writer approval, cast approval, and his structure the picture as a comeback vehicle for Maurice usual final cut…U.A. would only be allowed to interfere with the Chevalier, who had returned to Europe shortly after The Merry form of the picture is censorship boards demanded changes as a Widow. The resulting pictures had received scant distribution In condition of release. the U.S. Director Robert Florey remembered Chevalier in Paris Eager to work for a great director, Jack Benny came on board for hoping for the call from Lubitsch that would bring him back to $125,000 plus 10 percent of the distributor’s world gross in Hollywood. The call never came. excess of $1,250,000. …While the money was good, it wasn’t Beyond that, however, Ernst was going to try something why Benny was eager to make the movie. Benny had told different. “I was tired of the two, recognized recipes,” he would Lubitsch over a year before, long before the script was even write in The New York Times of March. 29, 1942.”Drama with written, that he’d do the film. “If you want me for a picture, I comedy relief and comedy with dramatic relief. I had made up want to be in it,” he had told Lubitsch. “It was always impossible my mind to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody for comedians like me for Hope to get a good director for a from anything at any time.” movie,” Benny remembered in 1973. “That’s why we made The scriptwriter, Edward Justus Mayer, had previously lousy movies—and here was Ernst Lubitsch for God’s sake, collaborated with him on Desire. Mayer began his creative life as calling to ask if I’d do a picture with him. Who cares what the Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—10 script is!” Benny said that Lubitsch was “the greatest comedy had to admit that Lubitsch was right. The painstakingly director that ever lived,” and the only other director to whom he developed character of a cheap, vain, petty, mean man who would have given an automatic “yes” was Leo McCarey. played the violin badly was not at all like the real Benny…except Although Ernst played around with the idea of Miriam for the part about the violin. Hopkins opposite Benny, she and the comedian had an uneasy Although Benny loved the part of Josef Tura and loved relationship. Moreover, as soon as Hopkins heard of Lubitsch’s Lubitsch (He’d have done anything for Lubitsch,” remembered interest, she began pushing to have her part built up. Benny Benny’s daughter, Jon. “He thought he was the best”), he was began campaigning for Carole Lombard, but Korda passed the extremely uncertain all through production. “Jack was an buck to Lubitsch, and Lubitsch passed it right back to Korda. innocent,” recalled Robert Stack, who had the difficult job of Finally, Korda and Benny went out one night in New York, with playing Carole Lombard’s young lover, in spite of the fact he had Korda getting very drunk. After some minor cajoling by Benny, known her since he was a child. “He’d never done a movie that Korda wired U.A. to hire Lombard. worked. He’d always ask me, ‘Is it funny” and I’d say “Jesus , Ernst had been good friends with Carole Lombard since don’t ask me.’ ‘But you’re an actor,’ he’d say. Basically, he was her earliest days at Paramount. scared to death.” Although he had never cast her in one Benny did not seem of his own pictures, and had even bothered by Lubitsch’s habit of stated, upon becoming production acting out every comedy scene, not head at Paramount, that the studio’s from the point of view of a director only long-range female assets were but that of an actor, a “corny Claudette Colbert and Marlene comedian,” in Benny’s words. Dietrich, they remained close. “Lubitsch was about the only director Lombard once told the director who ever really directed me,” Benny Salkow that she had attempted explained to Milt Josefsberg, one of to persuade Lubitsch to direct her in a his writers. “In practically all of my film entitles Love for Breakfast. He earlier pictures the directors would wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think it’s say, “Jack, you know so much more going to be a success,” Lubitsch said. about comedy than I do, play the Desperate, Lombard scene the way you feel it.’ The only countered with the only thing at her trouble was that I knew lots about disposal. “If it turns out to be a stinker, radio comedy, a little about stage you can have your way with me.” Ernst’s face broke into a smile comedy, and nothing about movies.” at the thought, but Lombard reached over the desk and snatched As if the problems of the picture’s financing and its the cigar from his mouth. “and if it’s a hit,” she said, “I’ll shove worried star were not omens enough, there were harbingers of this black thing up yours ass.” trouble. On the day Lubitsch was shooting a scene of storm troopers marching down the street, a visitor on the set, a woman Although Lombard’s husband, Clark Gable, was unenthusiastic who had just come out of occupied Poland, fainted dead away. about both the script of To Be or Not to Be and Lubitsch (whom Behind the scenes there was only one outbreak of hostilities. Gable supposedly referred to as “the horny Hum”), Lombard , musical director for the Korda operation, had signed on anyway, …for $75,000 in cash, with an additional originally been scheduled to score the picture, but he was $75,000 to be paid out of 4.0887 percent of the producer’s appalled by the script’s satirical take on the Nazis and flatly profits….Production began on November 6, and was completed refused to participate. Korda and Lubitsch assigned the musical in forty-two days, although the last work day for Carole Lombard score to Werner Heymann…. was New Year’s Eve, when she did a day’s work posing for still Stack found that the basis of Lubitsch’s gift was his shot by Robert Coburn. ability to take and maintain control. “He was a Renaissance man. Initially, the production was hampered by Jack Benny’s He could do it all. He was an actor, a writer, a cameraman, an art nervousness. Benny was an innately modest man with a string of director. He did not allocate responsibility. You must remember, so-so movies behind him that were rarely as bad as he pretended that didn’t happen in those days. Everybody was in a box….” they were. “I made twenty-two [movies],” he admitted at the end “But there was no ego working with Lubitsch. He never of his life. “And most of ‘em were good.” Nevertheless, he was manifested any himself and he obviously loved actors. He could mystified as to why Lubitsch had expressly chosen him for the be a little rough, yes. Jack was not an actor per se, and sometimes part of Josef Tura. [Lubitsch] made him do a lot of takes. Specifically, the scene “You think you are a comedian,” responded Lubitsch. where Jack comes home and finds me in his bed asleep and does “You are not a comedian. You are not even a clown. You are a series of double takes, he made Jack do at least thirty takes on fooling the public for thirty years. You are fooling even yourself. that scene.” A clown—he is a performer what is doing funny things. A Despite Lubitsch’s demands, the picture was made in an comedian—he is a performer what is saying funny things. But atmosphere of affection and warmth. Even if Carole Lombard you, Jack, you are an actor, you are an actor playing the part of a was not scheduled to work, she would drive into Hollywood comedian and this you are doing very well. But do not worry, I from her ranch in the San Fernando Valley to sit on the set and keep your secret to myself.” watch Lubitsch work. “Everyone was in awe of him,” Although Benny had never thought of it that way, he remembered Jack Benny, [but] we did nothing but laugh.” Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—11

…Lombard’s death [in a plane crash] necessitated some comments and sprang to his own defense with an article in The slight reediting in To Be or Not to Be to cover the deletion of a New York Times. “I admit,” he wrote, “that I have not resorted to particularly unfortunate line: “What can happen in a plane?” That the methods usually employed…to depict Nazi terror. No actual added another $35,000 to the budget. The total cost of To Be or torture chamber is photographed, no flogging is shown, no close- Not to Be came to $1,022,000…. ups of excited Nazis using their whips and rolling their eyes in Variety said that To Be or Not to Be was “typically lust. My Nazis are different; they passed that stage long ago. Lubitsch…one of his best productions in a number of years” and Brutality, flogging and torture have become their daily routine. “an excellent box-office attraction.” The National Board of They talk about it the same way as a salesman referring to the Review Magazine like the film, but against their better judgment, sale of a handbag. Their humor is built around concentration calling it “an…incongruous mixture…which many people will camps, around the suffering of their victims.” protest against, warmly and sincerely,…There is no escaping Although Lubitsch always prided himself on the what, to use the gentlest terms for it, must be called a lapse of decorousness of his films, the true genesis of To Be or Not to Be, taste in the picture. There have been, and will be, harsher words its daring analogy between the rape of a nation with the aesthetic for it.” rape of a playwright, was unknowingly inspired by the savagely Like, for instance, those chosen misanthropic W.C. Fields. by the New York Morning Telegraph, Over a year later, as Ernst which said that Lubitsch had devised “a was awaiting the release of his next sly approach, and a cute idea, and if it picture, the wounds had healed were laid in any place but Warsaw, it sufficiently so that Lubitsch could would have been among the best things talk about the original idea for his Lubitsch has ever done.” The man who most daring film. He explained to a was often derided for concentrating on reporter that he used to have a hard the trivialities of the boudoir was now and fast rule regarding jokes about being slammed for assigning himself a blindness. Blindness, Lubitsch morbid, serious subject and setting, believed, was the most terrible especially by the reliably dreary Bosley affliction that could be visited upon Crowther of The New York Times, who man and was therefore off-limits. called it “a callous comedy…a shocking But, he explained, one day at confusion of realism and Paramount he had seen a movie with romance….Frankly, this corner is a blind man (Fields’ It’s a Gift) unable even remotely to comprehend the “with comedy all about this blind humor…in such a juxtaposition of fancy man. I laughed and I laughed. Then I and fact. Where is the point of contact realized there can be no rules. It between an utterly artificial plot and the must depend on how it is done. anguish of a nation which is one of the “It seemed to me that the great tragedies of our time? …You only way to get people to hear about might almost think Mr. Lubitsch had the the miseries of Poland was to make attitude of ‘anything for a laugh.’” a comedy. Audiences would feel “It was tragic,” remembered Robert Stack. “The press sympathy and admiration for people who could still laugh in their just did a terrible number on Lubitsch, and the arrogance he tragedy.” Then, as always, he indicated he knew the true worth of supposedly had in making fun of the Polish situation. But he was what he had created, despite the carpings of his contemporaries. a Jew from the Old Country himself! It was the best satire and “What is the only picture that is still remembered from the last put-down of that’s ever been done, but they weren’t hip war? It’s not Griffith’s Hearts of the World, or any of the sad enough to pick up on what he was doing.” ones. It's Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms.” The press weren’t the only ones. At the preview of To Be or Not to Be at the Village Theater in Westwood, on came the …To Be or Not to Be begins as a backstage farce, turns into scene in which Concentration Camp Ehrhardt offers a scabrous wartime melodrama, then begins intermingling the strands until, one-liner about Josef Tura: “What he did to Shapespeare we are finally, it returns to farce at the end. Through it all, Lubitsch doing now to Poland.” The line was met with dead silence. never drops a thread in this, the most intricate, least foolproof After the preview, Lubitsch, Vivian, Charlie Brackett, Billy script he ever attempted…. wilder, Alexander Korda, Henry Blanke, and Walter Reisch went Lubitsch carefully constructs his film so that the laughs derive far to a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard for a post-mortem. After more from character than they do from situations. But the much throat-clearing and many non-committals sounds, Vivian situations—Benny’s immortal ‘So they call me Concentration finally suggested eliminating the line. Everybody else Camp Erhardt!” pas de deux with Sig Rumann—intenstify the immediately concurred. Walter Reisch remembered that Ernst traits of the characters; vanity flares up at the most inopportune was “aghast..to be accused of lack of taste made his face waxen moments, as when Tura, masquerading as a Nazi can’t resist and the long cigar tremble in his mouth.” fishing for compliments (unsuccessfully) for “that great, great Despite the virtually unanimous opinion of his closest actor Josef Tura.” Emotional imperatives, no matter how greatly friends, the line stayed in the picture. After To Be or Not to Be they increase the potential for disaster, are too strong to was released, Ernst was genuinely wounded by the adverse deny….To Be or Not to Be is consistently hilarious, but Lubitsch—TO BE OR NOT TO BE—12

Lubitsch’s sense of commitment, of engagement, is matched by than people expected it to be in such a film.” his characters’; they become moving because they put aside their The critical trouble Lubitsch encountered derived from the petty individual grievances for the collective good. Through their simple fact that black comedy wouldn’t be invented for twenty absurd but authentic bravery, they find a grandeur, a nobility they more years. While other directors—good ones—like George never could have achieved through their acting. Stevens (The More the Merrier) or Leo McCarey (Once Upon a At its comic heart, with lines like “What he did to Honeymoon) were playing the war safe, sappy, and, ultimately, Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland,” To Be or Not to Be is sentimental, Lubitsch dared to satirize oppressor and victim black comedy, and , as James Harvey has pointed out, its alike… coarseness, its moments of low vaudeville, are “not slapdash and In later years, Benny admitted that he only really liked three of inadvertent but aggressive and purposeful, aimed at all forms and his movies—Charley’s Aunt, George Washington Slept Here, degrees of power worship…The Nazis in this film are like The Meanest Man in the World. And, he would say, he only ordinary people. They are also monsters. Evil is clearly named; loved one—To Be or Not to Be. but it is also brought closer to familiar feelings and situations

SPRING 2012 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXIV Feb 14 Luchino Visconti, Senso 1954 Feb 21 Stanley Kubrick, Paths of Glory 1957 Feb 28 Sidney Lumet, 12 Angry Men 1957 Mar 6 Satiyajit Ray, The Music Room 1958 Mar 13 spring break Mar 20 Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales 1975 Mar 27 John Woo, The Killer 1989 Apr 3 Krzysztof Kieslowki, Kieslowski, Red 1994 Apr 10 Terrence Malick, Thin Red Line 1998 Apr 17 Fernando Meirelles, City of God, 2003 Apr 24 Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight 2008

CONTACTS: ...email Diane Christian: [email protected]…email Bruce Jackson [email protected] ….for the series schedule, annotations, links, handouts (in color) and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com ...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send either of us an email with add to BFS list in the subject line.

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo With support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News

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MIDNIGHT BEACON: A FILM SERIES FOR THE SENSES Friday Midnights February 10th—April 13th Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre (639 Main St.) Gen. $9/ Students $7/ Seniors $6.50 Contact: Jake Mikler (716)668-6095 [email protected]

Midnight Beacon is a new midnight movie series harking back to the golden age of art houses, when cinema was a vessel for exploration and audiences were transfixed by a diverse platter of celluloid equally jarring and dismembering the mind. The films are linked by a commonality of genre, themes or origin, showcasing New German Cinema, the death of the sixties, Eastern Bloc oddities, Road Movies, and Plastic Surgery Nightmares.

Feb. 10- Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970) Feb. 17- In a Year of Thirteen Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978) Feb. 24- Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1969) March 2- Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971) March 9- Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jires, 1970) March 16- Possession (Andrej Zulawski, 1981) March 23- Two Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) March 30- Radio on (Chris Petit, 1980) April 6 Seconds- (John Frankenheimer, 1966) April 13- The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)