THE FRONT PAGE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Great Kino-Lorber Blu-Ray of 1931 Classic

The Front Page (1931)
Dir. Lewis Milestone
Starring: Adolphe Menjou, Pat O'Brien, Mary Brian, Mae Clark, Frank McHugh,
Edward Everett Horton, Slim Summerville, Clarence Wilson, George E. Stone,
Frank McHugh, Maurice Black, Clarence H. Wilson, Gustav von Seyffertitz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Bro-o-o-omance, nothing really gay about it
Not, that there's anything wrong with being gay
Ay-ay-ay!
Bromance ,
Shouldn't be ashamed or hide it
I love you in the most heterosexual way.
- Chester See & Ryan Higa

Everyone knows and loves the Howard Hawks-directed screwball romantic comedy His Girl Friday, a great picture about shady Chicago editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) and his attempts to keep his best reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) from getting married and leaving the newspaper business, especially when a big story is breaking; the hanging of a convicted murderer who claims innocence, escapes and hides in the courthouse press room. Of course, Walter loves Hildy and deep down she loves him too. If anything, Walter's real modus operandi is to scuttle the marriage of Hildy to her straight-laced fiancé played by Ralph Bellamy.

How many of you are familiar with The Front Page? Based on the hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and directed by Lewis (All Quiet on the Western Front) Milestone, it's a great picture about shady Chicago editor Walter Burns (Adolphe Menjou) and his attempts to keep his best reporter Hildy Johnson (Pat O'Brien) from getting married and leaving the newspaper business, especially when a big story is breaking; the hanging of a convicted murderer who claims innocence, escapes and hides in the courthouse press room. Walter loves Hildy and deep down he loves him too. If anything, Walter's real modus operandi is to scuttle the marriage of Hildy to his straight-laced fiancé played by Mary Brian.

Even though The Front Page falls within the relaxed pre-Code days and all manner of not-so-subtle homoeroticism could have crept into the film, this is never the intent (well, not mostly). The Front Page might well be the first BRO-mance in American cinema. Walter and Hildy have no intention of sucking face or slamming their respective schwances up each other's Hershey Highways (though if given half the chance, they might).

They love each other, like men - REAL MEN! And not to disparage homoeroticism at all, but to describe Walter and Hildy's love, allow me to present a few more lyrics from the See/Higa song:

If I loved you more I might be a gay
And when I'm feeling down
You know just what to say
You my homie,
Yeah you know me
And if you ever need a wingman
I'd let any girl blow me off
Cuz you're more important than the rest

Milestone's film, produced by Howard Hughes, fell into public domain and has been duped and duped from dupes from dupes and then from other dupes so many times over the years, that inferior copies have had a clear effect upon making the picture seem creaky and vaguely unwatchable.

Not anymore. With this restoration we can now delight in what really makes this picture tick. And boy, does it tick. Like a time bomb and then some.

In the play, all of the action takes place in the courthouse press room. Director Milestone and screenwriters Bartlett Cormack and Charles Lederer (the latter being the scenarist responsible for His Girl Friday) stay relatively true to the play, but occasionally open things up, but only in the most naturalistic manner. The dialogue blasts a few million miles per second and the milieu is appropriately grungy, replete with plenty of garbage strewn about and clouds of cigarette smoke.

The cast is full of terrific character actor mugs, wrapping their lips around the sharp-edged lines with all the snap, crackle and pop money could by. These men are inveterate bad husbands, gamblers, drunks, lice of the highest order, BUT they are great journalists, laying in wait for the kill like a pack of hyenas.

Milestone's camera brilliantly captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of the setting without choking us on theatrical sawdust. His camera moves deftly and fluidly, but when he needs to, he lets it sit to let the great dialogue do the talking - knowing full well that there's nothing more cinematic than scintillating banter. On stage, the importance of the telephones connected to the reporters' various outlets could not be stressed enough, but with Milestone's direction, it's not only paramount, but his coverage of moments when the men all grab the phones has the rat-a-tat-tat power of a machine gun.

Pat O'Brien, who spent most of his career as a happy go lucky Irishman and/or priest, gets a rare opportunity here to indulge in his manner-than-manly qualities as Hildy. The dapper Adolphe Menjou is easily matched with Cary Grant's eventual shot at the role of the scurrilous newspaper editor Walter Burns. A supporting standout is the persnickety Edward Everett Horton as the fey reporter with a cleanliness fixation. Mary Brian acquits herself beautifully as O'Brien's lady in love and Mae Clark (known as the Baron's wife in James Whale's Frankenstein and as the moll whom Chaney pulverizes in the face with a grapefruit in The Public Enemy delivers one of the film's best performances as Molly Malloy, the hapless hooker with a heart of gold who desperately attempts to protect the innocent killer. She's so moving, it's hard not to get choked up over her selflessness and kindness.

Where The Front Page really crackles is its deeply black humour and satirical jabs at the entire business of both the media and politics. One hilariously nasty scene has reporter Frank McHugh questioning a woman victimized by a Peeping Tom while all the other guys in the press room bellow out catcalls and lewd, rude remarks. Another scene has a boneheaded Austrian psychiatrist (a great little cameo by Gustav von Seyffertitz) ordered to do a final examination of the falsely convicted killer. He wants the killer to recreate his crime and moronically requests the sheriff's gun (who even more moronically gives it up) and then hands the loaded pistol to the condemned man who, partially in fear and partially under hypnosis, fills the court-appointed psychiatrist full of lead. Even more hilarious is when Walter gets his hired thug Diamond Lou (a deliciously sleazy Maurice Black) kidnap Hildy's future mother-in-law to keep her trap shut when she discovers the secret behind the big scoop the boys are onto.

Bitingly funny and oddly prescient is the fact that the poor condemned man is being railroaded by the Mayor and Sheriff to garner the African-American vote since the murder victim was one of Chicago's very few Black police officers. Neither clearly cares about any of this, save for getting re-elected. To see a film 85 years old, a comedy no less, dealing with such charged political material makes one realize just how bad and empty most comedies are today.

Dark political humour aside, The Front Page, like its gender-switching remake His Girl Friday IS about love: love for the newspaper business, love for the company of other men and most of all, love between Walter and Hildy. Don't get me wrong, The Front Page allows us, like the cake we can have and eat it too, male-female romance in addition to the aforementioned manly BRO-mantic hijinx. I have to admit, though, that the machinations of Walter Burns to keep Hildy Johnson in the business, as well as a remarkable scene where the two men begin to reminisce about all their adventures together, IS downright warm, funny AND romantic.

For those who know and love His Girl Friday, The Front Page makes a lovely companion piece. You might even learn to love it just as much. If you don't know either, watch Milestone's film first, then Hawks', then cherish both forever.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5 Stars

The Front Page is available on a gorgeous Blu-Ray from Kino-Lorber. The picture and sound have never looked this good, however, the source material will eventually require an insanely meticulous, frame-by-frame going-over to remove over 85 years of wear and tear. The extras are simple, but such a thing of beauty, that this is probably one of the outstanding Blu-Ray home entertainment releases of the year. In addition to the inclusion of promo materials, two original radio broadcasts (one starring Walter Winchell) and a great little documentary about the Library of Congress film restoration program, this release features one of the best commentary tracks I've heard in years for any classic motion picture. Filmmaker, historian and home entertainment producer Bret Wood delivers a track that's entirely free of the usual crap on these things: no stupid anecdotal stuff, tons of great info about the film that even I didn't know before (and that takes some doing) and I thoroughly appreciated the variety of sources he uses (including whether they're corroborated or not). Wood's track is not only superbly researched, but his delivery is also terrific: clear, enthusiastic, but without sounding like a fanboy and NOT (thank God) sounding dry and academic. This is a stellar Blu-Ray that's well worth owning. It's a keeper!!!

BALL OF FIRE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX series "Ball of Fire: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck". Curated by the inimitable Senior Programmer James Quandt.

Prince Charming, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
Howard Hawks/Billy Wilder/Charles Brackett-Style

Ball of Fire (1941)
Dir. Howard Hawks
Scr. Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, S.Z. Sakall, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinskey, Richard Haydn, Aubrey Mather, Dana Andrews, Ralph Peters, Dan Duryea, Kathleen Howard, Allen Jenkins, Gene Krupa

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Yes, I love him. I love those hick shirts he wears with the boiled cuffs and the way he always has his vest buttoned wrong. Looks like a giraffe, and I love him. I love him because he's the kind of a guy that gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. Love him because he doesn't know how to kiss, the jerk! " - Sugarpuss O'Shea

In this day and age, how hard would it be for movies to include characters with colourful monickers like Sugarpuss O'Shea? (Accent on "like" since there can only be one Sugarpuss O'Shea as portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck.) Seriously, it's not as if anyone in real-life during 1941, when the great screwball comedy Ball of Fire was made, actually sported sobriquets (officially christened or not) like Sugarpuss O'Shea, anyway. So, hell, 2015 is as good a year as any for screenwriters and directors to embrace similarly delectable appellations in their motion pictures.

And dialogue? What's with movies today? Come on, get with the programme, dudes! (AND dudettes!) Really! Does anything in the 21st Century come close to the magnificent banter as wrought by those esteemed Ball of Fire scribes Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett? Check out this gloriously sexy, funny and eminently romantic repartee twixt Sugarpuss (Stanwyck) and Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper):

Sugarpuss: You think we could sort of begin the beguine right now?

Potts: Well, it's nearly one o'clock, Miss O'Shea.

Sugarpuss: Oh, foo, professor. Let's get ourselves a couple drinks, light the fire maybe, and you can start working on me right away.

Potts: I wouldn't think of imposing on you at this hour.

Sugarpuss: I figured on working all night.

Yes, it's always important for a gentleman to start working on Barbara Stanwyck tout suite! Imposing, indeed, if you ask this fella'.

Like any first rate romantic comedy, we've got a seemingly mismatched couple whom we desperately desire to get un-mismatched by getting together for an eternity of blissful whoopee by coming to appreciate and love each other's differences and in so doing, discover a few things or two about their own charming selves.

We begin with the introduction of a most unlikely Prince Charming in the form of Bertram Potts who, along with seven bookish codgers (Henry Travers, Oscar Homolka, Tully Marshall, S.Z. Sakall, Leonid Kinskey, Aubrey Mather and Richard Haydn), live and work in a stuffy old domicile branded the Totten Foundation by their late benefactor who has charged the men with writing a brand new encyclopedia bearing his surname and, of course, a decent entry within the A-Zs of all human knowledge.

Though our gents are well behind schedule and over budget (they're still working on the letter "S"), Potts is especially obsessed with his dictionary of contemporary American slang. After a conversation with the local garbageman (Allen Jenkins), our tightly-collared leading man discovers he's only begun to scratch the surface of the vulgar verbal vernacular of the modern American. He drags his coterie of stuffy old gents to a nightclub, hoping to connect with the beat of the country's au courant argot.

And WHAT a beat they connect with.

Legendary drummer Gene Krupa and his Orchestra are playing to a packed house and it's here where Potts encounters the woman of his dreams (only he doesn't quite know it yet). Krupa and his boys are blasting through a blistering rendition of "Drum Boogie" which gets even hotter with a closeup of a gorgeous hand clasping a curtain, its slender, titillatingly provocative finger tapping in rhythm to the beat until the hand clutches the fabric, wrenches it open and the sensual digit's owner, none other than hot chanteuse Sugarpuss O'Shea parades onto the floor and sexily croons along to the mirthful stylings of the orchestra.

Now, allow me please, an interjection not unlike the queries I opened my review with. Why, Oh Why, do we never see nightclubs in contemporary movies like the one on display here? Probably, because nightclubs like this don't exist anymore. Well, GOD DAMN IT, they should!

Before reading on, check out this clip from Ball of Fire and tell me afterwards you're not salivating at the prospect of such a nightclub appearing in a modern movie and on every bloody street corner on the North American continent.

Gene Krupa Orchestra -Drum Boogie-1941 by redhotjazz

And now try telling me that wunderkind director Damien Chazelle shouldn't have included repeat helpings of this clip in his otherwise perfect motion picture Whiplash.

But, I digress. Here's where Ball of Fire kicks into full gear. Sugarpuss is hooked up with mob boss Joe Lilac (a slimy Dana Andrews) and the District Attorney wants to subpoena her to testify against him. It's perfect! She needs a hideout and Potts needs an ideal guide to the lexicon of the savages. Lilac's henchmen Duke Pastrami (an even slimier Dan Duryea) and Asthma Anderson (the bumblingly slimy Ralph Peters) dispatch her into the lair of Prince Charming and the Seven Dwarfs of the esteemed Totten Foundation.

Here's where they fall in love (though they don't know it yet). Here's where the seeds of betrayal are sown. Here's where Ball of Fire delivers laughs and romance aplenty until its stirring climactic chicanery involving guns-a-blazing, mad-dashes and lovers destined to be together being ripped apart and brought back into each other's arms for some very hot Yum-Yum-Yum.

And if you want to know what a yum-yum-yum is, you're going to have to see the movie. I'm not spoiling that one for you.

The Film Corner Rating: ***** 5-Stars

Ball of Fire plays Thursday, February 12 at 9 p.m. at TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX in James Quandt's amazing series "Ball of Fire: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck". The film is presented in a GLORIOUS 35MM ARCHIVAL PRINT. For further info, visit the TIFF website HERE. As well, there are many Barbara Stanwyck films from this TIFF series which can be ordered directly from the following links: Buy Barbara Stanwyck movies in Canada HERE and/or Buy Barbara Stanwyck movies in the USA or from anywhere in the world HERE. You can even click on any of these links and order ANY movie you want so long as you keep clicking through to whatever you want to order. By doing so, you'll be contributing to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

THE PALM BEACH STORY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Screwball Sturges Hijinx via Criterion

KLYMKIW PREAMBLE:
WHAT IT WAS, WHAT IT IS NOW1

Imagine if you will, watching a battered film print of The Palm Beach Story in the 1980s, projected with a Kodak Pageant 16mm projector on the apartment wall belonging to old pal Professor Wm. Steve Snyder of the University of Manitoba film programme, stopping every 30 minutes or so in order to changeover from one reel of film to the next. Fair enough. But soon the print will return to wherever it came from. As this is a film that bears repeat viewing, whatever will be done?

Imagine if you will, Prof. Snyder recording the film off his wall with a Panasonic PK300, but needing to cut all three reels together, he must copy the tape to an old 3/4" deck and dub the separate reels into one seamless recording to another 3/4" deck and THEN copy it back to a VHS tape which, like psychopaths, we watch again and again because it's such a great movie and because a select few of us, including future filmmaker Guy Maddin and his roommate and future producer (ME), are huge fans of fruity tenor Rudy Vallee, who is not only in the picture, but, with a full orchestra, croons the immortal love ditty "Goodnight Sweetheart" under Claudette Colbert's window.

It's thirty years later.

Imagine, if you will that we no longer need a battered 3rd or 4th generation 16mm print, shot off a wall on VHS, duped to 3/4", then duped back to another 3/4", then duped down to VHS. This is because the Criterion Collection has released a gorgeous Blu-Ray with a full 4K digital restoration.

"Goodnight Sweetheart", indeed!

The Palm Beach Story (1942)
Dir. Preston Sturges
Starring: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea,
Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee, Robert Dudley, Sig Arno, Franklin Pangborn

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"I did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay. It was probably harder for a regular director. He probably had to read the script the night before shooting started." - Writer/Director Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges, arguably one of the greatest writer-directors in the history of cinema, wasn't always in the movie business. In fact, he didn't start writing until he was 30. Prior to a glorious career as the first writing-directing auteur of Hollywood's "talkie" period, Sturges lived in the lap of privilege and luxury.

Born into a hugely wealthy American family, he was bitten by the show business bug in childhood as a valued assistant to his Mom's best friend, the famed Isadora Duncan, for whom he helped mount numerous productions for the stage. His early adult life was spent serving his country in the signal corps during World War I and upon his return to civilian life, he joined his mother's posh design firm Maison Desti. It was the company's line of scarves which Isadora accidentally choked upon (I find this incredibly hilarious for some perverse reason) and where his first great success as - yes, an inventor - was a shade of lipstick that didn't leave whopping scarlet kiss marks on the flesh.

Sturges might well have had a charmed life, but he brought to his writing a wealth of life experience and once he started writing and directing his own pictures, he created a legacy that is all his own and uniquely American. He was neither above nor below mixing manic hijinx, pratfalls, ludicrous narratives and brilliant rapid-paced dialogue and delivery, but all the while, he generated material that was as rooted in humanity as it was designed to offer huge, knee-slapping laughs.

There was no one like him, nor will there ever be anyone as dazzlingly original.

The Palm Beach Story is one of his greatest achievements. Joel McCrea plays Tom Jeffers, a hardworking visionary inventor who just can't seem to get a break. He's madly in love with his beautiful wife Gerry (Claudette Colbert at her funniest and sexiest) and she with him.

Unfortunately, their financial situation is dire - so dire that Gerry, thinking that marriage is dragging hubby down, runs into a prospective new tenant for their Manhattan digs, played by the delightfully cantankerous Robert Dudley and Sturges-monickered as the Wienie King (I'm not kidding).

She gratefully accepts his charity after spilling her sob story, abandons her beloved, hops on a train to Florida (hoping to eventually meet herself a rich husband in Palm Beach), loses all her luggage upon plunging into the insane antics of the Ale and Quail hunting club (an irrepressibly jovial, albeit benevolent group of gloriously drunk old reprobates) and finally, as luck would have it, meets the filthy rich John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) during the long chug-a-lugging north-south steam engine ride from NYC to FLA.

Phew!

Tom, also the recipient of Wienie King charity (double I kid you not), follows Gerry. Not wanting to scuttle her plans of marrying the rich Hackensacker, our heroine has introduced Tom as her brother, whom she preposterously names as "Captain McGlue". Hubby becomes the prospective romantic interest of Hackensacker's sister, Maud (Mary Astor), AKA the Princess Centimillia, who makes a play for Tom whilst her whining lap-dog lover Toto (Sig Arno) crazily continues to follow her around.

Tom has a great idea to invent an airport in the sky. Hackensacker and the Wienie King are both thrilled by the investment prospects. Is it possible for things to turn around? Given the nonsensically harebrained proceedings, anything is possible.

Have I, for instance, mentioned there are identical twins in the mix? No? Good. Suffice to say it has something to do with a ludicrous wedding scene scored to the William Tell Overture and the copious melange of nuttiness in this tin of comedic comestibles which, is so infectious, you'll be desperately longing for the world, invented by the inadvertent strangler of Isadora Duncan to exist - for real.

Nobody made movies like Sturges. Thank God. There could only, really and truly be just one. And I steadfastly guarantee that your jaw will be agape from beginning to end - either in utter incredulousness and/or because howls of laughter will be spewing forth. Make sure you're not chewing on nuts.

You might choke on them.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5 Stars

The Palm Beach Story is available on a gorgeously transferred 4K Blu-Ray disc with wonderful uncompressed mono from The Criterion Collection and includes a solid array of extra features including an all new interview with film historian James Harvey who focuses on Preston Sturges, a terrific interview with the great comic actor Bill Hader about Sturges's influence, a delightfully ridiculous 1941 World War II propaganda short written by Sturges, a magnificent Screen Guild Theater radio adaptation, an essay by critic Stephanie Zacharek and delicious new colourful caricatured cover illustration by Maurice Vellekoop.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - "So, they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt?" Lubitsch's great black, screwball, romantic comedy gets the Criterion Collection treatment on BLU-RAY.

To Be Or Not To Be (1942) *****
Dir. Ernst Lubitsch
Starring: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart,
Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges, Sig Ruman, Tom Dugan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

An actor's worst nightmare: He is playing Hamlet before a packed opening night house. He finds his light onstage and looks soulfully into the depths of his character's spirit and launches into one of the greatest of Shakespeare's soliloquies. "To be or not to be..." he intones before catching sight of an audience member standing up in the middle of the second row then clumsily stepping over and onto the feet of those seated next to him. The show must go on, but never could any actor ever imagine being faced with the ultimate slap-in-the-face, the utter horror of an audience member walking out on: "to be or not to be." That such an indignity should occur but once in an actor's life is enough to sadly accept "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune", but when it begins to happen every night, surely any sane person would agree that "now is the winter of our discontent."

The actor in question is none other than Joseph Tura (Jack Benny), the male half of an acclaimed husband and wife thespian team in Poland just prior to Hitler's occupation. The seemingly dissatisfied patron of the arts, clutching a bouquet of flowers every evening is the young Polish Air Force officer Lt. Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack) who is smitten with Joseph's beautiful wife Marie Tura (Carole Lombard) and upon her instructions, "To Be Or Not To Be" is the code for handsome Sobinski to safely go backstage to pay homage to her.

Ah, the slings and arrows... of Cupid and eventually, Hitler. If there was (or is) a comedy that touches upon Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust that blends with the kind of "what if?" scenario eventually employed by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, but was actually made during World War II, then you need not look too hard to find it. With 1942's To Be Or Not To Be, director Ernst Lubitsch and his screenwriter Edwin Justus Mayer (journalist, noted playwright and writer of close to 50 screenplays from the silent era and beyond) crafted one of the funniest and most daring comedies of its time. That the film remains as one of the funniest and most daring comedies of ALL TIME, is no fluke.

The world was at war, anti-Semitism became the key driving force of Germany and while the role of the Allied Force always took centre stage, many brave artists risked and/or gave up their lives for the war effort. Carole Lombard, for example, never saw the finished product. Two months before the film's release in 1942, she perished in a plane crash. She was on her way to preside over a War Bonds drive. She was 33 years old.

To Be Or Not To Be is an important film in more ways than one. At its foremost, the movie is an astonishing example of everything that can make a motion picture as great and enduring a work of art as anything by virtue of every single detail being completely and utterly perfect. The film uses all the basic rules of film language developed to its stage in movie history, then proceeds to expand each and every one of those boundaries in ways that have defined and refined cinema in its lofty shadow and in homage to its quintessential place as a truly modern classic.

Take the film's opening - a stirring montage detailing the rise of Anti-Semitism in Poland in 1939. At first, it's a kind of News on the March celebration of Polish-Jewish culture and morphs into a powerful documentary-styled portrait of Nazi subjugation of Poland, and in particular, the Jewish people. The sequence essentially presents a chilling, darkly funny tale of Hitler arriving in the Jewish district of Warsaw to peruse the wares in one of the delis (utterly absurd given Hitler's vegetarianism and hatred of Jews). It then culminates in revealing how and why Hitler came to Warsaw using what is still one of the great pieces of screenwriting in movie history.

It's a brilliant and almost shocking turn that not only provides an answer to the question it poses, but leads us into the narrative's chief backdrop.

So, first and foremost - the film within its opening minutes signals that we'll be seeing an incredibly unique story and that the film will not at all shy away from the political realities in Europe the way almost every other film did during WWII. We take such politics for granted in our popular storytelling now. Lubitsch shot his film on the cusp of America entering the war effort officially and, unable to secure backing by the studios, turned to the far more daring British film industry to pick up the tab. To say the picture would have shocked audiences is an understatement. However, those who saw it, were also delighted and during subsequent decades, the film has stood the test of time and blows pretty much every movie of a similar nature right off the map. (And, there is, by the way, absolutely no need to see Mel Brooks' remake which, while not awful, is resoundingly ordinary.)

The storytelling is also quite unique in that Lubitsch gives us a film that blends several different strands of the comedy genre. The film is as much a biting satire (still on a par with Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove from many years later), as it is a madcap screwball comedy (replete with rapid-fire one-liners, pratfalls and humour lodged deeply in mistaken identity) and finally, it's a romantic comedy - a love story involving a triangle that serves to (no kidding) fight the Nazis, but also explore the differences between mere infatuation and deeply-seeded mature love and respect.

And yes, it is about the commitment of artists in wartime - a dazzling, rich and even moving portrait of how members of a theatre company must deliver their most astounding performances in their entire careers. One bad performance could lead to death for one if not all the actors and threaten the Polish underground's war effort. Ultimately, though, To Be Or Not To Be is a comedy about Nazis set against the backdrop of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw - a comedy that portrays Nazis as dangerous as they are mind-numbingly moronic.

This portrayal of Nazis certainly pre-dates Billy Wilder's Stalag 17) and frankly, it's a lot more viciously funny. The endless barking cries of "Heil Hitler!" that accompany any mere mention of Der Führer are continuously hilarious and no more so than when Der Führer himself walks into a room amidst the boot clicking and hands outstretched and in complete deadpan utters: "Heil Myself."

There isn't a single cast member who doesn't give it their all. Carole Lombard, once again proved why there were no actresses who could touch her with a ten foot pole. She's mad, sexy, passionate, sharp as a tack, funny as hell and good goddamn, the woman knew no boundaries - under Lubitsch's extraordinary direction, she displayed an unparalleled freewheeling, rip-roaring, cartwheeling, insanely, whirlingly, nutty dervish. The great Jack Benny, for whom Lubitsch conceived the role for, knocks it right out of the park as "that great, great Polish actor, Joseph Tura" a self-proclamation that gets hilariously shot down by a blustering, blundering Nazi commander who quips that what Tura "did to Shakespeare, Germany is doing to Poland." What Benny does as he infiltrates Gestapo headquarters is pure comic genius - but also, just pure great screen acting. He's acting as an actor who's acting as a Nazi.

Suffice it to say, after seeing To Be Or Not To Be, it will be impossible for you to ever get this line of dialogue out of your head. It's horrifying and audaciously hilarious as Lubitsch and Mayer milk it for all it's worth:

"So," says the Nazi commandant upon receiving a compliment from Benny as Tura in Nazi disguise, "So, they call me Concentration Cape Ehrhardt, eh?"

Concentration Camp Ehrhardt, indeed! Comedies about the Holocaust just don't get funnier than this.

And as Tura in Nazi get-up quips: "We Germans do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping."

"To Be Or Not To Be" is yet another must-own Blue-Ray from the Criterion Collection. Boasting a new, restored 2K digital film transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition, a fine new audio commentary with ace film historian David Kalat, "Pinkus’s Shoe Palace", a 1916 German silent short directed by and starring Ernst Lubitsch (a GREAT silent shiort by the way and an extremely revelatory look at a very popular series of comedies which celebrated and never tried to hide the Jewish-ness of the main hero), "Lubitsch le patron", an excellent 2010 French documentary on the director’s career which presents a thorough analysis of his work with detailed and knowledgable interviews with virtually every important French cinema egg-head, a lovely booklet featuring an essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and a 1942 New York Times op-ed by Lubitsch himself and one of the real treats are two - count 'em - TWO episodes of The Screen Guild Theater, a radio anthology series: "Variety" (1940), starring Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert and Lubitsch, and "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), an adaptation of the film, starring William Powell, Diana Lewis, and Sig Ruman. Another must-own title for any lover and/or student of cinema.