José Ferrer was honored in Summer Under the Stars last year, and I think it was for his day that TCM ran the 1980s remake of To Be or Not to Be. I made a point of watching it before it expired from my DVR and writing up a post to put up later since I'm running well ahead in my blogging.
Now, I think most of you know the plot, since this is a remake of the 1942 classic that starred Jack Benny and, in her final role, Carole Lombard. The movie opens up in August 1939, which is just before the Nazis invaded Poland and set off what is the European theater of World War II. Frederick Bronski (Mel Brooks) runs a theater troupe in Warsaw together with his much more famous wife Anna (Anne Bancroft) and behind the curtain they engage in comic bickering. Frederick has come up with an extremely anti-Nazi revue but, with the political situation, the censors force him to close that show, leading him to do a revival of Hamlet.
Andrei Sobinski (Tim Matheson) is a flyboy in the Polish air force, and also a big fan of the theater, going to all of Anna's performances. One night, ahen Frederick is doing Hamlet's soliloquy, Andrei goes to the dressing rooms to meet Anna, with Frederick getting jealous over who's sending Anna flowers. Not long after, the Nazis invade, and the airmen are forced to flee Poland for the safety of the UK where they can reform a Polish squadron much like the Czechs did if you recall the movie Dark Blue World.
José Ferrer plays Prof. Siletski, a putative member of the anti-Nazi intelligentsia giving speeches and the like. But in fact he's actually a Nazi sympathizer and spy. So when he tells the airmen he's going on an underground trip to Poland, they all stupidly reveal the addresses of their families, which would basically give up the entire Polish resistance if Siletski could give those names to his Nazi handlers in Poland. The only way any of this is figured out is because Sobinski wants Siletski to give Anna Bronski the message "To be or not to be", which will of course make sense to her. But Siletski seems to have no clue who Anna Bronski is, as though everybody in the Polish elites would know every stage actor out there, something that's long been a weird conceit of the movies.
Sobinski is parachuted into Warsaw to try to get to Bronski first in the hopes that the underground can stop Siletski. This leads to Frederick finding out about Anna and Andrei, and Frederick and Anna (and the rest of the Bronski theater troup) having to work with the underground to stop Siletski and the rest of the Nazis.
Now, as I mentioned before, this is a remake of a very classic comedy, so it's a bit hard to watch it without immediately thinking of the musical. And, to be honest, there are I think some ways in which it doesn't quite reach the level of the original. One is the presence of Mel Brooks. Brooks was a great satirist and does a marvelous job for the most part with his parodies. But this version of To Be or Not to Be is not a parody of the original or of any genre of film. As such, the blunt style doesn't always work, as with an extra scene at the beginning where Anna and Frederick are bickering in Polish. Some of the studio sets also look a bit too artificial, much in the same way I commented on when reviewing New York, New York and Pennies from Heaven.
On the other hand, by the 1980s Mel Brooks could be daring in a way that Lubitsch couldn't. Anna's dresser is very obviously gay, even before he reveals the pink triangle that Nazis made homosexuals were. A film released in 1942 could never have mentioned the Nazi persecution of homosexuals.
So this remake of To Be or Not to Be is interesting, if not always great.
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