WW Cinema (formerly Wildwood) is a Wednesday-night screening series at The Broad in which filmmakers and other artists introduce classic repertory titles to an eager film-nerd audience.  These introductions are usually pre-recorded via webcam, but occasionally a low-level celebrity sighting will shake up the weekly routine.  Simpsons & Spinal Tap vet Harry Shearer was the most recent in-person presenter for the series, providing some quick, concise insight about what he thinks makes Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 wartime comedy To Be or Not to Be a great work of art, then sticking around after the film to answer questions about his own comedic career.  Shearer mentioned that he had a personal, professional connection to the film’s star, Jack Benny, working with him briefly in his first role as a child actor.  He also argued that the film stands as proof that if you feel passionately about a topic—in this case the political & moral evils of Nazism—you should make a comedy about it instead of a drama (with Dr. Strangelove & Taking Off presented as examples of similarly effective satire).  WW Cinema’s programming has had a lot of influence on what gets reviewed on this blog since they moved their screenings down the street from my house, but I don’t always mention the pre-film intros because they’re not the reason I consistently go; I go because their film selections are consistently rewarding.  I’m only mentioning Shearer here because he put on a masterclass of how to present a movie to an audience who might not have seen it before.  He made the screening personal without distracting from the film.  He voiced his reverence for the artist behind it he found most essential to the piece (in his case Benny, not Lubitsch, the opposite of my connection to it).  He rooted the film in its historical context, both within the timeline of WWII and within the timeline of Benny’s career.  And, most importantly, he kept it brief.  I got the feeling that Shearer has suffered through so many poorly curated film intros and Q&As over the decades that he knows exactly how to not fuck it up, which I’m quickly learning at these WW Cinema screenings is a practiced skill; he’s a professional.

Of course, To Be or Not to Be should not need an intro at all, given that Lubitsch’s comedies are just as riotously funny now as they have ever been; just the gift of laughing along with a live audience instead of streaming it alone on The Criterion Channel is enough to make a modern screening of a Lubitsch classic feel like a cultural event.  Even so, I found myself confused as to why this film isn’t as ubiquitously referenced & recommended as The Great Dictator as the best contemporary Nazi satire.  Jack Benny may not be as enduringly popular as Charlie Chaplin, but To Be or Not to Be is just as daring as The Great Dictator – and twice as funny.  Benny first appears onscreen in full Hitler drag, roaming the streets of pre-occupation Poland and attracting a crowd as if he were a space alien who crashed a UFO.  That’s because Hitler had not yet arrived in the country, and Benny is instead playing a famous Warsaw actor who’s rehearsing to play the Nazi dictator on stage.  Even with the threat of Nazi invasion looming over their heads, most of the film’s scene-to-scene drama involves the lives & squabbles of Benny’s theatre troupe, mostly revolving around the love-triangle maneuvering of his even more famous wife (Carole Lombard) and her flirt-crush of the week (Robert Stack).  It’s just like any of Lubitsch’s classic adultery comedies, except that things get deadly serious at the top of the second act when the Nazi invasion of Warsaw starts in earnest.  Miraculously, Lubitsch gradually builds back to the playful humor of the first act as the theatre troupe schemes to survive & subvert occupation, eventually weaponizing their acting skills as dissident spies within the Gestapo.  The dramatic tension of the second act is shockingly brutal for a comedy, especially considering that it mirrored real-life atrocities happening in real time outside the theater walls during this film’s initial run.  The release of that tension when Lubitsch decides to get goofy again is much needed and incredibly effective, sometimes earning huge laughs just by repeating exact dialogue from earlier scenes.  It helps that most of the jokes are at the expense of artists’ narcissism instead of Nazi violence, which is handled with appropriate mourning & disgust.

If I were presenting what makes To Be or Not to Be great, I’d probably talk about the art of establishing an in-joke with your audience, so that callbacks to previous snippets of dialogue can become uproarious punchlines.  For instance, the title refers to a recurring bit in which Benny is interrupted while delivering the famous Hamlet soliloquy by an audience member who always leaves the room when he gets started.  It turns out that the line was used as a signal to his wife’s would-be lover to visit her dressing room while her husband is occupied.  Over time, we come to realize that she may have chosen that particular moment in his performance to drive him mad because they have a longstanding professional jealousy that fuels the fires of their marriage; we also come to realize that the husband cares more about the interrupted soliloquy than he cares about the adultery, even if just slightly.  It’s a hilarious bit that only gets funnier in repetition, to the point where the line “To be or not to be” earns instant laughs despite being one of Shakespeare’s most often repeated phrases.  It’s also a bit that would work in basically any theatrical setting, since it has nothing to do with the Nazi occupation.  In contrast, there’s another recurring bit in which a Jewish actor in the troupe (Felix Bressart) is constantly auditioning for bigger roles by delivering the “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which alternates between being incredibly funny as an example of theatre-world narcissism and incredibly poignant as a heartfelt plea against antisemitism.  Listening to these jokes build to increasingly louder laughs and starker silences in the room was like listening to a classical music piece build to an ecstatic crescendo after starting on softly bowed strings.  Lubitsch died nearly eight decades ago, but he can still command an audience like a master conductor leading an orchestra.  I’ve enjoyed each of his classic comedies that I’ve seen, but usually for the transgression of their playful view of sex & adultery.  I’ve never been so impressed with the joke-building structure of one in this way before, possibly because I’ve never seen one take such a harsh dramatic pause midway through and have to rebuild its humor on the rubble of real-life horror.

I did not present To Be or Not to Be, though, because I did not work with Jack Benny when I was a child. In fact, our time on this planet did not overlap at all.  Harry Shearer’s insistence on the film’s greatness as an argument that comedy can be as passionate & effective at addressing real-world political issues as drama was a convincing one.  His insights about his & Benny’s comedy careers did not interest me quite as much, but he did not hold command of the stage long enough for that disconnect to derail the screening.  He did a great job introducing a great film without distracting from it by making it all about himself, which To Be or Not to Be itself will tell you is extremely difficult for an actor to do.  Most actors would make a world war about themselves if they could get away with it.

-Brandon Ledet