"To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II movie. To make a comedy about World War II in the middle of World War II is major league balls, and he pulls it off brilliantly. It’s Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. It’s her last film; she’s amazingly funny. And Benny does this great trick of playing the character in the film and yet getting laughs off what you know about the Jack Benny character from out of the movie, without ever disrupting the flow of the story. Just a brilliant movie. Really well worth studying for how to direct a serious comedy about a serious subject, and yet be really funny."
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