Word: ernsting
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...with one or two exceptions, that show to what bad taste the movies can descend if given a chance. Anyone who has seen "Confirm or Deny" can testify to this. The latest example of Hollywood's attitude to the war is seen in "To Be Or Not To Be," Ernst Lubitsch's new farce, a very comic idea made acutely uncomfortable because the locale of the picture is Warsaw during the German occupation of Poland. In "Ninotchka" Lubitsch ribbed the foibles of the Russians and their Five Year Plan with great humor and relish. But the same formula...
...combination of the talents of Ernst Lubitsch, Carole Lombard and Jack Benny would certainly indicate that a highly palatable movie is in order. "To Be Or Not To Be" attempts to be a delightful and implausible tale of intrigue, spies, Gestapo and such, moulded about the tragic downfall of Poland in 1939. Like Charlie Chaplin's ill-fated "The Great Dictator" its humor is based on ridiculing Hitler and the overly efficient machinations of the Gestapo. Whether the current film is your dish or not depends upon your ability to laugh at situations founded on material which is essentially tragedy...
...Naturally none of us seriously believes that Harvard will under any circumstances turn into a mechanical or military institute, or that its technicians could ever train the soulless engines that people the nightmare world of the more-than-Nazis, the Nazi-Bolshevists like Ernst Junger. Yet, faith in liberal studies, like faith in freedom of opinion which we take almost too much for granted, needs to be renewed especially in wartime...
...Staraya Russa, 300 miles northwest of Moscow, where Colonel General Ernst Busch is penned up with a German Army, the Russians saw their best hope of destroying the enemy. General Busch had been there since last September, and he had plenty of reason to regret the dashing autumn drive of his army. For there was no doubt that Russia was crimping him tighter & tighter. He needed the spring as badly as any man on the front. And, above Moscow, the thaw was still six weeks away...
...Ninotchka, Director Ernst Lubitsch deliciously kidded the vagaries of the Soviets; in To Be he succeeds-as Hollywood had not yet done-in deftly ridiculing Hitler and his Nazis. His story is an actor's-eye-view of the Nazi occupation of Poland. As the Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne of Warsaw's Polski troupe, the Turas (Jack Benny and Miss Lombard) are a brittle couple. Their favorite soliloquy is Hamlet's To be, or not to be. . . . He likes to deliver it because it flatters his ego, at length; she likes it because it gives her time...