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To Be Or Not To Be

  • Director: Ernst Lubitsch
  • Year: 1942
  • Run-time: 1 hr 39 min
- This movie feels separate from any earlier or later genre in film. It's first and foremost a comedy, but in a harrowing setting pulled from an ongoing tragedy in another part of the world. The characters are Poles - including a prominent Jewish character - that speak with American accents and deal with relatable and often petty trifles pulled from any screwball comedy of the era, set in the emerging context of Nazi invasion. Lubitsch had the daring intent to humanize an urgent contemporary event in human history, and did so in a way that would be novel to his audiences, and a little uncomfortable to those of our time, given that there's no sense of actual Polish culture or heritage here. But our time has not been able to produce popular mainstream films that deal with international conflict - where are the great popular films about the Syrian crisis for example? It's not as daring as The Great Dictator, or as good, but it's a very worthwhile watch.

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