A wartime comedy/spy film from 1942 that's still worth a look: To Be or Not To Be

Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film, To Be or Not to Be, was daring an imaginative for its time, though much of the humor doesn't stand up too well today. He tells a complicated story centered on a small troupe of actors in Poland during the time o the Nazi invasion (1939) - canceling their season and putting the actors out of work. Through various complicated incidents the troupe becomes involved in supporting a resistance movement and spying on the Nazi occupying forces - all of which entails the actors playing roles in real life, pretending to be Nazi soldiers/officers. The Lubitsch touch here is that the film, though the stakes are real, is not a spy movie in any conventional sense; in fact it's much more of a comedy, with the Nazi officers clownishly ridiculous (it's no surprise that Mel Brooks did a remake/update of this film, which seems right in his wheelhouse) and the Polish actors completely hamming it up (they're portrayed as not especially good actors even in best of times) in their new "roles." Particularly funny is the scene in which the young Jack Benny engages in one-on-one dialog with a Nazi officer, filling time with joshing and small talk. Clearly, this film was meant not only as a wartime diversion but also as wartime propaganda - and if anything it seems that he underplays the evil of Hitler and his forces, making them comic buffoons rather than racist and malevolent tyrants and toadies. The film today feels very much of its time and place, but EL always brought a touch of style and glamor to his films (in this one, thanks to Carole Lombard as the doyenne and thanks to some snazzy costuming and set design as well), which, along with a few good laugh scenes (notably, Benny's 3 attempts to get through the eponymous soliloquy) this film is still worth a look.