Eight years after Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century, Carole Lombard returns to the world of heroic high hamming, this time in an amazingly audacious farce alongside Jack Benny. They play Maria and Joseph Tura, who run a theatre troupe in Nazi-occupied Poland and find that patriotism forces them into unlikely roles – Joseph as SS Colonel ‘Concentration Camp’ Ehrhardt, Maria as seductress of a Nazi spy. ‘What I have satirised in this picture are the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology,’ said Lubitsch.
To Be or Not to Be (1942)
Ernst Lubitsch’s audacious farce, satirising ‘the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology’.
- 1942 USA
- Directed by
- Ernst Lubitsch
- Produced by
- Alexander Korda, Ernst Lubitsch, Ernst Lubitsch
- Written by
- Edwin Justus Mayer
- Featuring
- Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack
Who voted for To Be or Not to Be
Critics
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Directors
- Andreas Fontana
- Switzerland
- Michel Hazanavicius
- France
- Hirokazu Kore-eda
- Japan
- Alejo Moguillansky
- Argentina
- Tilda Swinton
- UK
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