-How did you get here?
-I was born here.
-Now what made you decide to die here?
-Him.
-What do you want from the führer?
-What does he want from us?
-What does he want from Poland? Why possess us? Why? Why?
-Aren't we human? Have we not eyes? Have we not hands?
-Organs, senses, dimensions, affections, passions?
[Kyle offscreen] This movie is a comedy.
-Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases?
This speech is also from a comedy, though a very different one,
written about 350 years before this movie was made,
William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
Though modern audiences tend not to think of it as very funny.
-If your prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?
-If you poison us do we not die?
-If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
Of course, this movie had a hard time proving funny on its first release.
Bosley Crowther writing for the New York Times in his review said:
Almost as if it was a little too soon to joke about the subject matter in, uhm...
Let me check when this movie came out...
The Blitzkrieg smoke had yet to clear over Warsaw,
and yet Ernst Lubitsch still chose to tell this light farce,
full of mistaken identities disguised as a love triangle,
all against the backdrop of literal goddamn nazis.
And the result is a comic masterpiece.
[Narrator] But suddenly something seems to have happened. Can it be true?
It must be true, no doubt! The man with a little mustache!
Adolph Hitler.
[Kyle] To Be or Not To Be is the story of a troupe of Polish actors in conquered Warsaw,
using their acting skills to impersonate Nazi officers and run circles around the occupation,
with a through-line of a love triangle between two star actors and a bomber pilot,
in a complex plot involving one of Shakespeare's most overquoted lines.
-To be or not to be. That is...
-That is the question!
This is admittedly not a Shakespeare adaptation, not strictly.
Aaand, welcome to the backdoor pilot for my new series
Cinema Antifa, where we look at movies about fascists getting their asses beat in various awesome ways.
-Sound good? -Yessir!
Speaking of Tarantino, you can't tell me that he didn't get the idea
of a plot involving Nazis in a theater from this movie.
[Nazis shouting 'heil Hilter']
-Heil Hitler!
-Heil myself.
-That's not in the script.
One of the funniest running jokes in the movie is how easy it is
for a troop of hammy actors to mimic equally hammy Nazis.
To the point where there's almost no difference between
the people acting like fascists and the fascist themselves.
Hmm... There's a lesson in that somewhere...
But honestly, summarizing To Be or Not To Be,
or even trying to break down the complex plot and comic coincidences,
would ruin the experience of watching it yourself.
It's Jack Benny's finest screen role.
-Three nights in a row. Even Shakespeare couldn't stand seeing Hamlet three nights in succession.
-You forget you're playing Hamlet.
-Oh, that's right.
Carole Lombard's last performance.
-Shall we drink to the Blitzkrieg?
-I prefer a slow encirclement.
It's so complex and so witty and so...
so wrong.
-You know, you're quite famous in London, colonel. They call you Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.
-Heh, yes, yes, we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping. Hahahaha...
What can one say but "yikes."
And if you've seen the Mel Brooks remake, it does fine.
But telling the same jokes in 1983 mitts it loose so much to the original's immediacy.
-You know colonel, you're quite famous in London.
-I am? -They call you Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.
-They do? Well that's because we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping. Get it? Hahaha...
-Actually, no. -Ahem.
The original was made when the larger world knew something was terrible about the Nazi regime
but the full extent of its monstrosity had yet to be made public.
And yet it holds up.
-War... It's really war.
-People are gonna kill each other and be killed.
It's a feat of comic tone balancing the lightest of jokes with the highest of stakes,
a balancing act that Hollywood would dub 'the Lubitsch touch'.
Lubitsch himself was a German refugee from the Nazis,
a Jew who flourished on the German film industry and in Hollywood.
And he was a marked man, and he knew it. He got name checked in Nazi propaganda.
[The Jew Ernst Lubitsch was hailed as a German film producer]
[Kyle] The film was also written by two Jewish émigrés.
Though for some reason, Lubitsch never uses the word Jew or Jewish or Judaism in this film.
But even though his words aren't explicit, his coding is.
-Mr. Rawitch, what you are, I wouldn't eat.
-How dare you call me a ham?
And of course there's the way he uses that speech.
-If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?
-If you poison us do we not die?
-What a Shylock you would have been.
Well... would he?
Would he have been a great Shylock?
I mean, of all the hashtag problematic characters in the Shakespearean Canon,
Shylock is one of the hashtag problematic-est.
Anti-semitism was rampant in Shakespeare's England.
Officially the Jewish population had been expelled from England since 1290.
When he wrote The Merchant of Venice, he likely wouldn't have known any actual Jewish people.
Though he would have known Christopher Marlowe's even more hateful play The Jew of Malta.
Which includes a bit where the title character poisons an entire nunnery.
And he was also, like Shylock, a moneylender.
The stereotype of the Jewish moneylender had its roots in actual economic reality,
since Christians were forbidden from practicing what they considered usury, or charging an interest.
And since the Jewish people were barred from owning land or joining guilds,
money lending was really the only professional option left.
As for the actual character of Shylock, moved to greed after repeated insult,
he is one of the most difficult characters to play.
For most of his early history, the character was done with a bright red wig,
comically, broadly. Though sympathetic portrayals could have been seen as far back as the mid 18th century.
But it's a difficult character to play. Nobody is wild about staging this play.
Even the Nazis weren't wild about staging the play.
Not because of Shylock, but because of the fact that Shylock's daughter Jessica
converts and marries the christian Lorenzo.
Nazis.
But most if not all modern productions play Shylock for pathos.
The play retains the structure of a Shakespearean comedy,
all good parties married off by the end, with the lone antagonist ousted and humiliated.
But modern audiences can't ignore the tragedy of Shylock's character.
Denied his justice and denied his revenge, forced to abandon his wealth and his faith.
History gave him a pathos that isn't present in the text.
Well, except for that speech.
-Aren't we human? Have we not eyes? Have we not hands?
-Organs, senses, dimensions, affections, passions?
That speech quoted by
-If you prick us do we not bleed?
-Don't tempt these people, Mr. McCoy.
-If you prick me,
do I not... leak?
-Hath not a robot eyes? Hath not a robot hands?
-Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
-If you prick us do we not bleed?
-Yeah, battery fluid maybe.
It may be one of the greatest acts of humanist reappropriation.
That we've taken this villain speech from one the most famously anti-semitic plays in the Western canon,
and turned it into a universal plea for human dignity.
Ultimately using Shakespeare's ambiguous language and empathy for all his characters,
in favor of the anti-fascists.
And moreover, using it to save the lives of the entire anti-fascist resistance.
A comedy in a comedy using the tragedy in the comedy to prevent tragedy in our... comedy.
There's got to be a better way to phrase that.
Jeffrey O'Brien, writing for Criterion, called To Be or Not To Be's ultimate outcome
Using the Nazis own penchant for theatricality against them, fighting theatre with theatre.
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
So what else do you do with a bad actor, but boo them offstage.
To Be or Not To Be, a play that's literally life or death.
And I leave you with one of the greatest one-liners in movie history.
-That great, great Polish actor Joseph Tura. You've probably heard of him.
-Oh, yes, as a matter of fact, I saw him on a stage when I was in Warsaw once before the war.
-Really?
-What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.
-Goodbye colonel. -Goodbye professor.