Trouble in Paradise (1932)

USA, 83 minutes

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Writers: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, Aladar Laszlo, Ernst Lubitsch

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: W. Franke Harling

Editor: unknown?

Cast: Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Edward Everett Horton, Charles Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith, Leonid Kinskey

What a difference the Hays Code makes. Until those rules for Hollywood movie decorum came along in 1934, addressing problems that may or may not have existed, the idea in some outraged circles was apparently that anything goes on Hollywood movie sets. Come to find out, it’s “anything goes” for its time, most of it more like knowing and witty, not necessarily coarse. It’s not like there is nudity in Trouble in Paradise or anything like that, just lifelong criminals getting away with it and laughing about it, plus various jolts of sophisticated European adultery (most of it with perfectly conventional values). It’s the Lubitsch touch, more or less, the lightly cynical, lightly romantic take on human affairs of director and cowriter Ernst Lubitsch.

He remains a titan of his time, though sometimes it seems he is more like forgotten now. Billy Wilder reputedly had a sign in his office which read, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Even before Alfred Hitchcock, Lubitsch was one of the earliest examples of a Hollywood director famous for a uniquely recognizable style. “Lubitsch was always the least Germanic of German directors,” the critic Andrew Sarris wrote of him, “as Lang was the most Germanic.” There’s little question Trouble in Paradise could not have been made even three years later.

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

USA, 99 minutes
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writers: Melchior Lengyel, Edwin Justus Mayer, Ernst Lubitsch
Photography: Rudolph Mate
Music: Werner R. Heymann
Editor: Dorothy Spencer
Cast: Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Robert Stack, Stanley Ridges, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Sig Ruman, Tom Dugan, Charles Halton

I still haven't seen all of director and cowriter Ernst Lubitsch's best pictures, and I think at this point I might prefer The Shop Around the Corner for pure artistry (also known as "the Lubitsch touch"). But To Be or Not to Be, presently considered his greatest, is a strange beast that really should not be missed. A Hollywood comedy about Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1939 and the early '40s, what is perhaps most amazing about it is that it was made shortly after the invasion and while the death camps were starting to happen. The actual invasion of Warsaw in September 1939 is shown, complete with devastation. A calendar page in the last third of the movie shows a date of December 16, 1941—nine days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and nine days after Germany's decision to move forward with the "Final Solution." It has to be doubtful that the filmmakers knew about either while they were working on the movie.

That's right, I said comedy—that's what Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in particular are doing here. It's the darkest days of World War II in Poland but To Be or Not to Be is also lighthearted, urbane, musical, and funny. What's less surprising, of course, is that no one knew what to make of this movie in 1942. It was variously considered in poor taste, a downer when morale needed to be kept up, and even maybe unpatriotic. Perhaps most shocking for audiences at the time was the treatment of German Nazis as mostly harmless if obviously dangerous buffoons. It's much more like Hogan's Heroes than Come and See (or even Stalag 17)—in fact, it's quite likely that the set piece of a frustrated Colonel Klink bellowing "Schultz!" finds its direct origins here.