I only just recently heard of the existence of To Be or Not to Be, and so I decided to give it a shot. After watching it, I really feel in the minority on this one. This movie has been hailed as one of the all-time great satires, and so it’s made a lot of “best of” lists. I watched it with my girlfriend, and she actually liked it a fair bit, which was surprising because we do end up agreeing on a lot of the classics. However, this movie just didn’t resonate with me personally. I kept meandering back and forth between liking it and not, so I’ll try to be fair here.

To Be or Not to Be came out in the midst of World War II, and like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, the movie was a contemporary satire of the war. And to be fair, The Great Dictator really isn’t one of my favorite Chaplin movies, so maybe this humor doesn’t really work much for me. Anyway, the movie is about an acting troupe in Warsaw that tries to track down a German spy after the Nazis invade Poland. To do this, Polish actor Joseph Tura goes straight into the belly of the beast by disguising himself as members of the Nazi party during his mission.

I think my biggest problem with the movie is that it felt very tonally inconsistent to me. I’m not saying that a movie ever needs to be exclusively one thing, but the movie felt like it kept switching off between comedy, drama, and romance. The movie starts out with a really goofy voice-over and has some funny satirical moments, and then it gets very serious for a while. What’s weird to me is that I seem to be the only person that feels this way. What I will say about To Be or Not to Be, though, is that it definitely works best when it’s doing its satire well. There are some scenes especially later in the film that brought me back to enjoying it, and these moments were really fun.

I’m pretty sure what ended up happening here is just the simple case of not feeling like I could connect to a movie made 50 years before I was born. I think I may have enjoyed this more if I saw it when it came out (although possibly not, since apparently it wasn’t very well-received upon release since it was making fun of serious current events), but I just wasn’t able to connect myself to the humor in the movie most of the time. It worked for me at some points, but at others it just simply didn’t resonate with me. Again, though, I very much seem to be in the minority on this one, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Give it a shot if it sounds like it would interest you.

2.5/5