In what might be, in the hands of someone other than Ernst Lubitsch, a contradiction in terms - a witty, delightfully satirical comedy set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw - Jack Benny leads a troupe of ham actors in outsmarting the Gestapo and reducing them to ridiculous rubble. Benny gives a beautifully-paced, more-than-typically animated performance, disguised along the way as a Gestapo agent, and Hamlet himself. Carole Lombard, as Benny's wife and fellow trouper, is both hilarious and ingenious in what was to be her last film role.
To Be or Not to Be was attacked, for obvious reasons, on its release as “callous” and “tasteless,” but, as a British Film Institute note points out, it was made “in the spirit of so many films produced during the war years, (to) mercilessly lampoon the Nazis... reducing the hated enemy to incompetent figures....” In any case, it can certainly be better appreciated today than in 1942 for its beautiful construction as a film: “As a piece of scripting, To Be or Not to Be is remarkable - there is really only one joke. But so cunning is the plotting that one is never conscious of it. The whole thing is like an intricate series of Chinese boxes.... As the narrative gets more and more complicated, with impersonations increasing by the score, so the situation becomes increasingly funny.....” (BFI) (JB)