Clever, Funny, Well-Acted Comedy Adventure Of Polish Theatre Troupe Outwitting Nazi Invaders

Rating: 6/10 (28 August 2011)

Josef and Maria Tura are husband-and-wife actors running a theatre company in Warsaw in 1939 when Germany invades Poland. By chance, they discover that visiting Professor Siletsky is a Nazi agent with a crucial report on the resistance, and resolve to use all their acting skills to stop him getting those names to the High Command.
This hilarious and ingenious classic screwball comedy is one of the funniest films of the forties, and for my money the highlight of Lubitsch, Benny and Lombard's careers. It's a great satire of acting vanity, a bravura piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, but most of all an immensely enjoyable crazy story of people pretending to be someone they're not. Benny and Lombard are both sensational - he's haughty but long-suffering and she's wicked but jovial - and the supporting cast are full of great performers. Atwill was often accused of hamming it up (see Mystery Of The Wax Museum from 1933) but here he is given carte blanche to do so, and Ruman is outstanding in the choice comic part of Colonel Ehrhardt the buffoonish Gestapo officer (for more of his genius, check out the Marx Brothers' A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races). Brilliantly written by Edwin Justus Mayer, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel. Tragically, blonde bombshell Lombard, a terrific actress and comedienne and a huge star in her day, was killed in a plane crash a couple of months before the film's release. A truly inspired comedy classic; don't miss the excellent 1983 colour remake starring real life husband-and-wife Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, a rare instance of a remake which is every bit as good as the original.