Don't Spit On My Field Gray Gabardines.

Rating: 8/10 (13 July 2010)

What a fine film from Ernst Lubitsch. Jack Benny is an egomaniacal famous actor in Warsaw, and Carole Lombard his unfaithful actress wife, when the Nazis take over Poland in 1939.
The plot involves secret information, impersonations, spies, clandestine trips back and forth to England, assignations with Carole Lombard, and -- oh, let me recount how the featured assignation works.
Lombard is visited in her dressing room by a young and animated Robert Stack, an bomber pilot in the Polish Air Force. He's been sending her flowers for days and is overwhelmed by her presence. He boasts of his exploits and she melts while listening. When he's leaving, after she agrees to see him again, he tells her he's never met a real actress before. She replies in a throaty voice, "I've never met a man who could drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes before." (Lubitsch pulls this stuff off with aplomb.) The agreement is that they will meet again in her dressing room for further conversation, so to speak, during her husband's recital of Hamlet's soliloquy -- "To be or not to be, that is the question." Every high school kid knows it because it's perhaps the best-known line that Shakespeare ever wrote.
So, we see the performance of "Hamlet" with Robert Stack in the second row. Jack Benny enters, alone, pauses, closes the book he's holding, and looks up soulfully. It's his great moment. "To be . . . or not to be --", he begins, and Stack stands up and shuffles his way noisily out to the aisle to be with Lombard. Benny stops talking and gapes at him.
This goes on for several nights in a row. Benny has no idea why the same officer stands up and leaves at the same point in the soliloquy. It's driving him nuts. Finally, with the main plot underway, Benny is unable to perform Hamlet again until the end of the movie, on the English stage. He strolls onto the stage in the same puffed-up manner, folds his book, and begins. "To be . . . or not to be?" And a British naval officer in the second row shuffles his way out.
I don't want to get into this because I'll give away more gags, and the plot is complicated and has several surprises tucked away in it. Sig Rumann gives ample support as a comic Gestapo officer. When the movie first appeared, it was excoriated by some observers who felt that the Nazi conquest of Europe was not in the least fit as a subject for comedy. Fortunately, the Allies won the war and we can now sit back and enjoy this radiant comedy without feeling the guilt of the contemporary audience.