A film that never should have been made

Rating: 1/10 (7 September 2013)

Some topics lend themselves to satire; genocidal military dictatorships do not. This is perhaps one of the most offensive, ill-conceived movies ever produced in the name of public "entertainment." To portray Nazis as idiotic buffoons and to script in dialogue and insert one- liners about the comedic aspects of concentration campswell that's got to just be a laugh a minute.
And here Jack Benny portrays a pretentious Polish actor, Joseph Tura, which gives Benny full license to present us with his comedy persona in full form. Tura, who craves greatness as Shakespeare's Hamlet is prime Benny, the smug, mocking, self-satisfied comedic fool only satisfied when he can make everyone else look foolish. So guess what?! THAT makes him smart. Got it? Hilarious!
This film, Carole Lombard's last, is a sad coda to her sparkling career. Purportedly her husband Clark Gable urged her not to take the part of Maria Tura, but she liked the script?!
The esteemed director Fritz Lang, half-Jewish, (his Jewish mother had converted to Catholicism) and an émigré from Nazi Germany who fled that country just in time, should have known better.
This movie was a disaster when it was made at the height of World War II, and more than 70 years later is still, to put it mildly, an embarrassment. No matter what Leonard Maltin thinks.