Age does not become that film very well

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2009)

A decent little film shot in 1942. Could we say it was shot dead? Or is that too Jewish a piece of humor? The plot is absurd and that is why it is funny, but not a deep intellectual funny, nor a deep artistic and esthetic funny, nor even a deep emotional funny. Just funny for war time, funny for when everyone is crying, weeping or plain dying. We think of the other Jewish actor who did a similar impersonation of Hitler, Charlie Chaplin. But Charlie Chaplin played the real Hitler, whereas here it is always a false Hitler, tricking the real one in his back. That is funny for sure but that is also kind of vain, except if you take it is as a plain entertainment for an audience that wants to laugh at their arch enemy. So they play the Mickey out of him. But what's left after sixty or more years? Not much except the scene about "to be or not to be", played three times on a stage in the context of Hamlet in the film. The force of this sequence is in the fact that an actor plays Hamlet in front of an audience and a member of that audience stands up and walks out on him when he says that sentence, and the scene is of course in front of another audience, us. The second level of that distantiation is what makes it funny because we can see the varying surprise and anger of the actor who takes it as an insult before he learns it was coded language. And it is true Ehrard has it right when he says that what this Tura actor did to Shakespeare, they, the Nazis, are doing it to Poland. But then the third time, and that is only true for us, though also for one person in the audience in the theater in the film, it becomes absurd because there is no explanation for that total stranger to stand up and walk out. But apart from that the film has aged tremendously and even the acting has aged and seems so unnatural, though we can accept that from most of the main actors who are supposed to be actors and hence to play a role, even in real life. The only important thing is that in 1942 the film is heavily speaking of concentration camps. If Lubitsch knew about it, why didn't the allies know about it and why didn't they do something to stop the massacre? At least they had no excuse and they cannot pretend they were less informed than Lubitsch. That's the only interesting point of that film still today.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID