A Film Canon

 

 

This comic masterpiece presents fascism, rather than Shakespearean tragedy, as the true vocation of a ham actor, as Polish Jews Joseph (Jack Benny) and Maria Tura (Carole Lombard) transform their theatrical troupe into a provisional resistance movement, centred on the abduction and impersonation of a Nazi official. As 'Professor Siletsky', Joseph quickly learns how to achieve just the right level of hamminess, or hysteria, to be convincing, as well as how to construe improvisation as bureaucratic assurance, or, more effectively, suspicion, recognising that the most successful way to overcome stage fright is to attribute it to someone else. In the process, Nazism is reduced to a farce - a series of petulant, infantile impulses barely contained by propaganda and regalia - most explicitly in Gestapo!, the comedy that the troupe are forced to replace with Hamlet, but more pervasively in Lubitsch's unwillingness to distinguish between reality and theatricality. Hence the stagy dialogue, occasional reversion to a Shakespearean register and, above all, sudden shifts in tone and locale, which are only reinforced by the intrusive voice-over. In the same way, the theatrical life is presented as conducive to fascism. Not only does the first artistic quarrel centre on who can best perform Hitler, but the theatre itself frequently verges on a kind of concentration camp, most poetically in the transformation of spotlight into searchlight. From this perspective, Shakespearean language is ultimately offered as an escape from both fascism and theatricality - a synecdoche for the silence of the oppressed, as figured in Shylock's monologue, which is frequently quoted, but pointedly unperformed.