To Be or Not to Be

To Be or Not to Be; comedy, USA, 1983; D: Alan Johnson, S: Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, Tim Matheson, José Ferrer, Charles Durning, Christopher Lloyd, George Gaynes

Warsaw, 1 9 3 9. Whenever actor Frederick Bronski does his "To Be or Not to Be" Hamlet monologue on stage, Lieutenant Andrei leaves his seat to have an affair with Bronski's wife Anna. This is interrupted when the Third Reich invades Poland, and several Polish soldiers flee to London from the Nazi occupation. In London, secret Nazi collaborator Siletski receives a list of Polish resistance members and heads off to Warsaw to hand it over to the Nazis. Andrei rushes back to Warsaw to stop him, and gets help from Frederick to disguises himself and his actors as Nazis to get the list from Siletski. When Nazi Colonel Erhardt is involved and Adolf Hitler shows up to attend a play at the theatre, Frederick and his group of actors manage to escape by disguising Frederick as Hitler and leaving with the group on a plane to London. 

41 years after Lubitsch's excellent comedy classic "To Be or Not to Be", Mel Brooks produced and starred in this remake—it is unnecessary, with the only improvement that it is in color, but the fact that it isn't a disaster is already something. Just like most remakes of comedies, this one also suffers from the problem that the viewers familiar with the original will have a feeling as if someone is just repeating great gags from the 1st film, which will make the entire story predictable, since numerous sequences are just a copy/paste of Lubitsch's film. However, even in this re-heating up of a frozen dinner, this film manages to extract a few charming moments. Directed lazily by Alan Johnson, the story works mostly thanks to an energetic cast, though Mel Brooks overacts his role as Frederick way too often. The opening sequence is sympathetic since Frederick and Anna are performing on stage and speaking Polish, before the movie switches to English, as the narrator points it out by breaking the fourth wall, and one new, original joke is refreshing and welcome—in a satirical play in the theatre, Frederick performs as Adolf Hitler, and says this to the audience: "I only want peace... A piece of Poland!" This snappy joke reminds a bit of Brooks previous film, "The Producers". Unfortunately, the authors did not have that many more original ideas which would warrant rehashing this story again, which feels too much like it is a slave to the original. Among the cast, the best performance was delivered by the excellent Charles Durning as Nazi Colonel Erhardt, who is both funny and childishly naive at the same time.

Grade:++