Ah, Lubitsch

Rating: 8/10 (19 February 2019)

Only Ernst Lubitsch could have balanced all of the aspects of this film and had it come out right. He satirizes the Nazis without diminishing the evil they represented, delivers a comedy amidst the light drama of a resistance movement, and adds a little element of romance besides. The timing for the film was extraordinary; while it was being shot America had not yet entered the war, and before it was released, Carole Lombard had tragically died at age 33. The film opens a troupe of Polish actors rehearsing a play satirizing the Nazis in August, 1939, a month before the invasion, and it was highly topical at the time.
Lombard is simply radiant in her last film, and finds the right restraint and touch between comedy and cooing out double entendres. Jack Benny is funny in the role of her husband, a ham actor whose wife begins talking to an ardent admirer in her dressing room when he begins Hamlet's soliloquy. The other man (Robert Stack) is a Polish airman who soon sweeps them up into an effort to stop a spy within the resistance's ranks.
As always Lubitsch treats his viewers with such respect, letting us connect the dots without hitting us over the head with explanations or plodding along linearly. His humor is so clever, and varies between an actor raising an eyebrow which the audience will know the meaning of, and things like the repeated line "So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?". He also gets in a lot of jabs at the idiocy of the fascists, the most memorable being when two Nazis are told to jump out of a plan without parachutes and do so with a couple of Heil Hitler's and no questions asked. There are also moments that are quite touching, such as the Jewish member of the company quoting 'The Merchant of Venice' ("If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?").
My favorite lines were the sly repartee from Carole Lombard to elude the Production Code:
Stanislav: You might not believe it, but I can drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes.
Maria: Really?
Stanislav: Does that interest you?
Maria: It certainly does.
Siletsky: Shall we drink to a blitzkrieg?
Maria: I prefer a slow encirclement.