Word: lombards
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...Carole Lombard, Jack Benny; TIME, March...
...Korda; United Artists) is the late Carole Lombard's last picture. Like Son of the Sheik (Rudolph Valentino), Steamboat 'Round the Bend (Will Rogers) and Saratoga (Jean Harlow), it was posthumously released. Fortunately for all concerned, To Be is a very funny comedy, salted to taste with melodrama and satire...
...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 to entertain her male admirers backstage...
What the Polski company does to the Gestapo is first-rate entertainment- thanks to a score of good performances by the cast, fresh dialogue and plot (authored by Lubitsch and Melchior Lengyel) and the sure, saucy, suspenseful Lubitsch direction. Miss Lombard's natural, likable, vibrant performance is up to her standard. Mr. Benny, who plays his role straight, doesn't need his prop stogies to be funny...
...that a quarter hour on the air has over an eight-column front page in the matter of keeping emphasis where it belongs. Boldest comment yet ventured by a newscaster on the press's sense of proportion was made by CBS's Elmer Davis, apropos the Carole Lombard crash story. He said with justice that headlines and stories took precious little account of the 15 Army airmen in the same crash...