“To Be or Not to Be” (1942)
Now regarded as one of the director’s very best movies, “To Be or Not to Be,” a Nazi-themed farce, was widely greeted with cries of “too soon” on release (nothing changes). Reviews were hostile — Bosley Crowther called it “callous and macabre” in the New York Times — box office was poor, and the film received only a single Oscar nomination. But once Hitler had been vanquished, the film’s reputation started to be restored, revealing perhaps Lubitsch’s most daring, accomplished and even funniest film. The plot involves Joseph and Maria Tura (Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, the latter a last-minute replacement for the fired Miriam Hopkins, and sadly in her last role; Lombard was killed in a plane crash two months before the film’s release), a terrible ham and his unfaithful wife, who become embroiled in the resistance movement after the Nazis invade Poland. Soon, they’re mixed up in a plot to kill a senior Nazi, and to escape the country. One can certainly see why audiences might have shifted uncomfortably, with the outcome of the war still uncertain — lines including “What he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland” still retain their power to shock today (Lubitsch’s furious anger was personal; his baby daughter had been on board a boat sunk by a German submarine in 1939, though she and her nanny fortunately survived). But at a remove, the film now feels like the complete package — hilarious, moving (not least in Benny’s performance of Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech) and with life and death stakes that grip until the end (in some ways, it’s the “Argo” of its day, while obviously much broader in its humor). Benny and Lombard are so perfectly suited to Lubitsch that it breaks your heart that they never were able to work with the director again. An obvious inspiration for the career of Mel Brooks (who went as far as remaking the film in the 1980s, to dismal results) among many others, it’s likely to keep inspiring generations to come.
“Heaven Can Wait” (1943)
Despite being even more transgressive than “To Be or Not to Be” — it’s a Production Code-baiting story of a lifelong philanderer (Don Ameche) pleading his case to be allowed into hell (“I can safely say that my whole life was one continuous misdemeanor,” he says at one point) — “Heaven Can Wait” turned out to be Lubitsch’s greatest commercial success, and earned Best Picture and Best Director nominations from the Academy. Unconnected except by title to the 1978 Warren Beatty film, it sees Ameche’s Henry van Cleve in Hell’s waiting room, greeted by the devil himself (Laird Cregar, in one of the definitive, and most sympathetic, screen portrayals of Lucifer). In order to gain admission to hell, he has to lay out his sins, and goes on to tell the story of his spoilt-upbringing, how he stole wife Martha (Gene Tierney) away from his cousin, and how he proceeded to cheat on her for a decade. What feels and looks like a reasonably broad fantasy turns out to be disguising a sharp, wise and occasionally touching portrait of marriage and its difficulties. Henry isn’t necessarily bad, he was just born that way, and for all his indiscretions, truly loves Martha. While Ameche has been criticized by some over the years, it’s a tricky role to pull off — sort of a blank by necessity — and does manage to give him depth and charm. It’s certainly one of Lubitsch’s most lavish and technically impressive films, the director reveling in the use of Technicolor, but it feels very personal as well; it’s a film as much about death as anything else, and the director was already in ill health, and would pass away three years later. And while other films followed, it’s “Heaven Can Wait” that stands as his last great achievement.
– Oliver Lyttelton, Kevin Jagernauth
