To Be or Not to Be (1983)

Directed by Alan Johnson. Starring Mel Brooks, Anne Bancroft, Tim Matheson, Charles Durning, Christopher Lloyd, José Ferrer, George Gaynes, Lewis J. Stadlen, Ronny Graham, Jack Riley, Estelle Reiner, George Wyner, Earl Boen. [PG]

Refashion of Ernst Lubitsch’s classic wartime satire/black comedy, with husband-wife team of Brooks and Bancroft replacing Jack Benny and Carole Lombard as famous Polish theater actors who aid the resistance efforts the against Nazi invasion. Follows the original picture closely enough to question its purpose in existing; tweaks and new gags are sometimes quite funny, but familiarity makes it all feel a little stale—what was daring in 1942 is old hat by 1983 (the lampooning of the Führer even comes off as second-rate compared to Brooks’ The Producers fifteen years prior). Marks the only time that Brooks took a starring role in a film he neither wrote nor directed (though he did produce), and the lightness of the “Lubitsch touch” apparently has no place in a movie where his character has to stammer through a Hamlet soliloquy in exasperation, and he later spends most of the last act mugging while sporting a Hitler moustache. As “Concentration Camp Erhardt,” Durning plays it pretty broadly, but does get a few laughs.

57/100