To Be or Not to Be
Short description
In Warsaw at the start of the German occupation, a theatre company finds itself caught up in espionage. A young Polish airman uses a nightly cue in a performance of Hamlet to signal a rendezvous with the leading actor's wife, and that arrangement draws the troupe into an effort to stop a German agent from using a list of Polish pilots' families as blackmail. The company's actors end up putting their costumes and their talent for impersonation to work against the occupying forces.
Ernst Lubitsch directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer, and it sits between The Shop Around the Corner and Heaven Can Wait in the run of features he made. Carole Lombard and Jack Benny lead the cast as the married actors Maria and Joseph Tura, with Robert Stack as the airman, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill and Stanley Ridges among the fifty-one credited players.
Released in March 1942, the film was made for about a million dollars and returned roughly twice that at the box office. Audiences have held it in high regard over the decades: on IMDb it holds 8.1 out of 10 from around 50,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.8 from a much smaller base of 863.
What's left behind the scenes
- In 1983, Alan Johnson remade Lubitsch's film starring Mel Brooks and Ann Bancroft in the lead roles. At the same time, he replaced Tura's surname with Bronsky, which belonged to another character—the actor playing Hitler.
- In the film, Maria says the line: "What could possibly happen on an airplane?" After the tragic death of the actress in a plane crash, the line was removed.
- The role of Maria Tura was the last in the career of 33-year-old Carole Lombard, who died in a plane crash two months before the film's release.
- Immediately after the film's release, the director was accused not only of complete ignorance of the Polish occupation realities of the time, but also of making fun of a military tragedy and portraying Poles at the level of Goebbels' propaganda. It was only twenty years later that Ernst Lubitsch's film appeared in Polish distribution, and it is preceded by a corresponding commentary by Kazimierz Rudski.
- Jack Benny's father was so deeply disturbed by the sight of his son in an SS uniform during a screening that he wanted to leave immediately.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
