Review of To Be or Not to Be (1998) by Jake C — 16 Aug 2017

Of course, when Lubitsch's masterpiece was released mere months after the US entered WWII, it was a divisive critical and commercial failure. Who could have the deplorable audacity and bad taste to mock a horrific tyrant like Hitler? Yet what Lubitsch so clearly intuited already in the early part of the war was how realist psychologization and dramatic gravity mythologized the figure of the Führer, making him larger than life and inevitably granting him the political and social power he so desperately craved.

Hence humor, subverting Hitler's terror not by denying it (as with Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful") but by showing the inherent farce that underlies the world's most violent war machine.

This subversive mocking is made most evident in a scene when the traitorous Professor (Ridges) attempts to convince Maria Tura (Lombard) to join the Nazis: He praises the humanity, the culture, the social greatness of the Nazis, trying to smugly sell her on the movement based on its more polite and human elements.

This scene stands in stark contrast to more recent Nazi films, such as Ragussis' "Imperium" (2016), which try to show the human and psychological side of Nazis not for comedic but pathetic dramatic effect, as if to say: Look, they were not monsters, but humans too, subjects we can identify with and feel for, minds to understand and hearts to change.

What Lubitsch exposes in his wittily crafted satire is the failure of such ideological attempts: In humanizing the Nazis, filmmakers do not lessen their mythos, but heighten and excuse it.