Peter Barnes, whose credits include the play The Ruling Class (1969) and the screenplay for Enchanted April (1992), has written a BFI Film Classics book on Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942). He starts off by summarising the film's story and the background to how it came to be made. To Be or Not To Be has a complex plot which operates on many different levels - actors in war-torn Poland pretend to be Nazis so as to fool the genuine articles around them. Barnes then goes through the careers and contributions to the film of its principal personnel - actors Jack Benny, Carole Lombard and Sig Ruman, director Lubitsch, of course, as well as screenwriter Edwin Justus Mayer, executive producer Alexander Korda and cinematographer Rudolph Maté. He also surveys the varying critical reactions to the film, citing Dilys Powell and Roger Manvell as two of many commentators who, Barnes feels, did not understand, or were not prepared for, the film's sophisticated humour and blackly comic take on the Third Reich. In the final section, he travels over To Be or Not To Be's wittiest passages and celebrates a film whose 'heroes are more than a match for the master race'.
For all his evident and largely uncompromised adoration of Lubitsch, Barnes is at pains not to put forward an auteurist argument for what he admires about the man's directing. And this is also implied by his very welcome individual appreciations of the various personnel, which show how films can often arrive at greatness through the combined forces of several highly talented, and individualistic, people.
Given such level-headed observations as these, then, it is a shame that his approach doesn't flow smoothly. With the various stages of his discussion broken not by, say, chapter or subject headings, but simply by a line of dots, the writing sometimes feels as though it is still in note form. On top of this, the standard of English is sometimes very poor, and at times actually makes the text difficult to follow. The BFI has allowed some sloppy proofing and editing of this book. It is compounded by Barnes's tone, which tends towards the old-school stern schoolmaster, such as in his (understandable) dismissal of the film's negative notices.
I have to say, furthermore, that I didn't care too much for his occasional sweeping statements. For example, he dismisses Mel Brooks's 1983 remake as 'hopeless' in his first footnote, but that film has its supporters; while in his consideration of the fact that Lubitsch basically had final cut on his own To Be or Not To Be, Barnes says that 'In no film, since roughly the 1960s, has a director been given this degree of autonomy.' Surely Steven Spielberg, who not only directs for but runs DreamWorks, has final cut on his movies nowadays? And in the eighties Woody Allen carried enough clout to scrap and re-shoot September (1987) in its entirety.
As far as the BFI Classics books go, therefore, Barnes's entry is not a standout, but it will turn the reader onto the film in question, and possibly onto Lubitsch in general.
Reviewed by Edward Lamberti
