Anniversary of the funniest anti-fascist comedy film

February 19, 2022 marks the 80th anniversary of the premiere in Los Angeles of one of the most controversial films in the history of world cinema - the anti-fascist comedy "To Be or Not to Be". The director of this picture is Ernst Lubitsch.

To understand the source of this film's controversy, one must remember the history of its creation and its creator. Ernst Lubitsch came from a Jewish family of a prosperous businessman, the owner of the weaving industry Simon (Simkha) Lubitsch. Simon Lubitsch at the end of the 19th century moved from the Belarusian city of Grodno (at that time - the Russian Empire) to Berlin, where he married Anna Lindenstadt. Ernst was born from this marriage in 1892. Since 1911, Ernst Lubitsch began to play in the performances of the Deutsches Theater of Max Reinhardt. Ernst Lubitsch's film career began in 1912. First, of course, as an actor and director of silent short films. In 1918, Ernst Lubitsch made his debut as a director of the full-length horror feature film "Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy)". Lubitsch's first film attracted the attention of American distributors, thanks to which he made 16 successful films within 4 years. 

Lubitsch's successful directing activity in Germany led to the invitation of the young cinematographer to Hollywood in 1922, where his work gained additional impetus. By the beginning of the 1940s, the number of films created by Lubitsch in America reached 22, including films entered the Golden Thousand: "Ninotchka", "The Shop Around the Corner". In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Lubitsch, together with his colleagues, screenwriters Melchior Lengyel and Edwin Justus Mayer, immigrants from Eastern Europe, decided to create a film satire on the Nazi regime.

In 1941, the script for the future comedy was created, and in October of this year, the filming of the picture began. Let me remind you that at that moment the United States was formally neutral in relation to the events taking place in Europe. Sympathy for the Nazi regime was too strong in America. And only after December 7, 1941, after a crushing blow inflicted by the Air Force of Japan, an ally of Nazi Germany, on the US Navy in Pearl Harbor, the American government finally made a decision and declared war on Germany and its allies. In this regard, the film, the genre of which was originally, in peaceful conditions, conceived as a satirical comedy, having appeared on the screens in completely changed military conditions, caused at least bewilderment among many, both among film critics and ordinary moviegoers. And for many, it's just hatred.

The New York Times film reviewer Bosley Crowther was especially raging, bringing down all his supply of bile on Lubitsch's film: "in a spirit of levity, contused by frequent doses of shock, Mr. Lubitsch has set his actors to performing a spy-thriller of fantastic design amid the ruins and frightful oppressions of Nazi-in-vaded Warsaw. To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case.Perhaps there are plenty of persons who can overlook the locale, who can still laugh at Nazi generals with pop-eyes and bungle-some wits. Perhaps they can fancy Jack Benny, disguised be-hind goggles and beard, figuratively tweaking the noses of the best Gestapo sleuths...Those patrons will certainly relish the burlesque bravado of this film. And many more will enjoy the glib surprises and suspense of the plot. But it is hard to imagine how any one can take, without batting an eye, a shattering air raid upon Warsaw right after a sequence of farce or the spectacle of Mr. Benny playing a comedy scene with a Gestapo corpse. Mr. Lubitsch had an odd sense of humor—and a tangled script—when he made this film." - NYT By Bosley Crowther, March 7, 1942 

Naturally, in those conditions, there was no need to talk about any festival successes of the film. And the box office performance of the film was quite modest: with a budget of 1.2 million dollars, the box office of the film was 1.5 million dollars. And the point here is not that in wartime people are not up to the cinema. For example, the film "Casablanca", released in the same year, with a budget of just under a million dollars grossed almost $7 million.

It is possible that the following circumstance influenced the audience's interest in the film in a negative way. In mid-January 1942 actress Carol Lombard ("My Man Godfrey"), wife of the famous actor Clark Gable ("Gone with the Wind", "It Happened One Night"), who played a leading female role of Maria Tura, flew to her home state of Indiana, as part of the campaign selling war bonds. After selling nearly $2 million in war bonds in Indianapolis on January 15, she made her way back to Hollywood to attend the January 21 premiere. The mother of the actress, who was traveling with her, wanted to take the train, but at Carol's insistence, they flipped a coin and decided to fly. On the way back, the plane crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas. All on board were killed. The release dates have been pushed back. During this time, one phrase of Maria Tura was cut from the film. When aviator Sobinski invites her to fly his plane, she says, "What's the worst that can happen on an airplane?"

Over time, the attitude of critics and moviegoers towards this film has changed. During the period from 1983 to 2011, 5 remakes and theatrical adaptations of Ernst Lubitsch's film were produced in different countries. I don't know about theatrical productions, but none of the remakes come close to the moviegoer ratings of the original. And they, these ratings, are as follows: 72% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Ernst Lubitsch's film "To be or not to be" according to FilmGourmand version was 8.152, thanks to which it took 533rd Rank in the Golden Thousand.