This Month

In 1972, Ernst Lubitsch's World War II-era comedy To Be or Not to Be (1942) was included in the Los Angeles Film Festival, thirty years after its original premiere. The screening provided cinephiles and critics alike with the opportunity to reassess what had been in its day a box office failure, damned by both the tragic death of leading lady Carole Lombard in a plane crash while on a bond tour a month before its release and subsequent audience diffidence about a movie making fun of the Third Reich only two months out from America's entry into the global conflict. Chief among those who discerned a lost classic was funnyman Mel Brooks, who announced his intention to remake the film as a vehicle for himself and actress-wife Anne Bancroft. Commitments to other projects delayed the production for a decade before Brooks got rolling on the update in the fall of 1982, shortly after the founding of his own production company, Brooksfilms.

A Mel Brooks film for all intents and purposes, To Be or Not to Be was signed by another director - Alan Johnson, a veteran Broadway choreographer who had overseen the Terpsichore in Brooks' The Producers (1967), Blazing Saddles (1974), and History of the World, Part 1 (1981). To adapt the Lubitsch script by Edwin Justus Mayer, Brooks relied upon old friend Ronny Graham, with whom he had first worked on Broadway in New Faces of 1952 (alongside such rising talents as Alice Ghostly, Paul Lynde, and Eartha Kitt) and Tony-winning playwright Thomas Meehan, who later adapted The Producers for Broadway. Taking for himself the key role of Frederick Bronski (played by Jack Benny in the original), a cut rate Shakespearean actor who takes on the Reich by impersonating first a Nazi official and then Adolf Hitler himself, Brooks installed Bancroft in the Carole Lombard role while dealing out supporting parts to such capable actors as Charles Durning, Christopher Lloyd, Jose Ferrer, and Tim Matheson. Brooks even made room in the ensemble for Estelle Reiner, wife of his longtime collaborator Carl Reiner, and his own 10-year-old son Max Brooks.

As fate would have it, this remake of To Be or Not to Be fared no better with moviegoers in 1983 than had the original in 1942. Brooks later blamed distributor 20th Century Fox, who rushed the release into the competitive Christmas season; critics of the day suggested instead that the film was further evidence that Brooks was losing his touch with popular tastes, that his manic Borsht Belt-derived style of comedy was outdated. Made for $9 million, To Be Or Not to Be earned back only $13, which represents a hefty loss according to Hollywood bookkeeping. Nonetheless the project retained a special place in the heart of Mel Brooks for putting him on the big screen alongside his wife of then twenty years for the first time. The pair had met in 1963, when Brooks was still a struggling writer and Bancroft was singing and dancing on a Perry Como TV special. They remained married for forty one years before Bancroft's death from uterine cancer in 2005. Bancroft's sparkling presence in To Be or Not to Be is the principal reason why the film remains Mel Brooks' personal favorite.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources:

It's Good to be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks by James Robert Parish (Wiley, 2008)
The Big Screen Comedies of Mel Brooks by Robert Alan Crick (McFarland & Company, Ltd., 2002)