To Be or Not to Be · reception & legacy
1942 · Ernst Lubitsch
How To Be or Not to Be has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
In 1942 it was widely attacked as tasteless — a comedy about the Nazi occupation of Poland while the war was raging, with critics like Bosley Crowther scandalized. Today it's canonized as one of the greatest comedies ever made, its audacity now read as moral courage rather than bad taste.
What's debated
The perennial fan debate is whether it or The Great Dictator is the definitive anti-Nazi comedy — and whether laughing at fascism defuses it or dignifies it, an argument the film itself has been winning for eighty years.
Its footprint
'So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?!' and the barbed line 'What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland' are endlessly quoted, and the film cast a long shadow: Mel Brooks remade it in 1983, and every Nazi-mocking comedy since owes it a debt.
Where it stands
A cornerstone of the Lubitsch canon and a Letterboxd darling — the 'you must see this' entry point for classic Hollywood comedy alongside Trouble in Paradise and The Shop Around the Corner.