I was watching To Be Or Not To Be the other night, a 1942 comedy featuring Jack Benny and Carol Lombard. Still holds up as a funny movie, not always the case for me with films from this period.
The movie concerns a group of Polish actors in occupied Warsaw scheming to foil the Nazis and aid the Polish resistance. The farce all turns on the actors having to act out parts in real life to outwit the evil Nazis and keep from being found out and, presumably, killed. The dire consequences of failure never really have to be spelled out, other than that the main Nazi being duped is nicknamed "Concentration Camp Earhardt." I gather a 1942 American audience didn't need any more information than that, and probably didn't want it. This is after all a comedy. Modern audiences have a much greater stomach for on-screen violence but then again 1942 audiences had to deal with a lot more of the real thing.
Which leads me to the scene I found most interesting. It's almost a throw-away, maybe twenty seconds of actual screen time. As our intrepid heroes are making their escape in a car driving through Warsaw, we see a shot out their window of a building bursting into flames.
"The Railway Station! The Resistance is alive!"
It is a triumphant moment. Again, all the information a 1942 audience needed was that it was in occupied Warsaw and the resistance was responsible. From there on it naturally followed in their minds that blowing up a rail station was a good thing. The implicit moral clarity really struck me as I watched it in 2004:
As in "Yay! The insurgents have blown up the Railway Station!"
Sure, there was some set-up, earlier in the movie, showing what a prosperous, modern city Warsaw was just prior to invasion, and what a squallid, bombed-out wreck it was as the German troops marched in to take over. Yes, every time we see inside the Nazi offices they are smoking cigars and drinking expensive liquor and generally living it up, while outside the Poles huddle in the ruins of their city, shuffling along with hurried steps and downcast eyes to avoid the scrutiny of the heartless occupiers. And when one of the villains tries to woo Mrs. Tura (Carol Lombard) with a line about how life is good if you're on the right side, it's pretty clear that it's a Faustian bargain he's proposing. The irony of his defense of the Reich as consisting of human beings who just want to make the world a better place and for everyone to be happy isn't oversold. I'm sure the people sitting in the theatre watching the movie got it.
Both homicide and suicide are played for laughs. As long as it was happening to a Nazi, Americans probably felt okay laughing about it, and really the sight of an actor dressed as Hitler ordering two soldiers to jump from a plane without parachutes and them immediately and unquestioningly complying is still pretty funny.
Posted by flamingbanjo at December 13, 2004 09:58 AMI hadn't thought about the Railway Station moment that way. That is an interesting comparison.
The real point of warped perspective for me was listening to them make a joke of the nickname "Concentration Camp Erhardt". I really had to remember that "Concentration Camp" at that time meant what we were doing to the Japanese over here-- clean little communities of outcasts in orderly rows of buildings, with their activities regulated and limited outside contact, but dances for the teens on Saturday nights and Boy Scout troops organized to play bugle while they raised the flag each morning. I don't want to make it sound like the American internment facilities were nice, but they seem much less threatening when contrasted with the mountains of bones and scenes of unprecedented horror that were indelibly burned into our memories after we actually got a look inside their German counterparts 3 years after the movie was released. I don't know that the writers would have treated the term so casually if they could possibly have seen in their imaginations what we all now have linked to those words.
Posted by: The Green Man at December 13, 2004 09:53 PMProbably not.
Posted by: flamingbanjo at December 14, 2004 10:21 AM