How comedy can make villains banal and ridiculous

You aren’t supposed to judge a film by its cover, but exceptions can usually be made for the Criterion Collection DVDs, which use imaginative artwork to pay homage to great movies. Last week I was pleased to learn that the Satyajit Ray classics Charulata and Mahanagar will soon be out on Criterion, but equally gratifying was a glimpse of the cover design for Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be. The picture on the DVD package is a brightly coloured drawing of a famous image from Hamlet: the gloomy prince, primed for a soliloquy, holding Yorick’s skull in his hand. But the skull is positioned in front of a figure dressed in a smart Nazi uniform, covering his head.

This image — fascism defeated, or made buffoonish, by theatre — nicely summarises a film about a Polish acting troupe outsmarting Hitler’s men. And it reminds me of what the critic David Thomson said about this masterful satire: “If one side is making To Be or Not to Be in the middle of a war and the other is not — you know which side to root for.”

I have no intention of spoiling Lubitsch’s film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but just as an appetiser, its opening sequence involves the apparent appearance of Hitler — alone — at a market corner in 1939 Warsaw. As he walks about hesitantly and residents gape at him, a breathless voiceover — resembling a baseball-match commentary — wonders: “Is he by any chance interested in Mr Maslowski’s delicatessen? That’s impossible! He’s a vegetarian. And yet, he doesn’t always stick to his diet.

Sometimes he swallows whole countries. Does he want to eat up Poland too?” More digs at the leader follow in the next few minutes: an actor (the man who was pretending to be Hitler in that opening scene) responds to salutes with a “Heil Myself”, and a little boy speculates that if a brandy took the name Napoleon, perhaps Hitler “will end up as a piece of cheese”.

Of course, To Be or Not to Be was scarcely the only Hollywood film of its time to lampoon the Fuehrer. One of my favourite “Hitler cameos” occurs in Preston Sturges’s 1943 comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, about a small-town girl who gives birth to sextuplets, a national record.

As news spreads across America and the world, we see the reaction of the incensed dictator, and a headline from a German newspaper reads “Hitler Demands Recount!”

Around this time, the good folks in animation were also making propaganda cartoons such as the pleasingly titled Herr Meets Hare (in which Bugs Bunny accidentally tunnels to Germany while trying to find Las Vegas), Donald Duck in Nutzi Land (the peevish Donald finds himself working in a Nazi factory) and The Blitz Wolf, which begins with the assertion “The Wolf in this photoplay is NOT fictitious. Any similarity between this Wolf and that (*!!#%) Hitler is purely intentional.”

Interestingly, not all these films draw positive responses today. Many people tend to be affronted by the idea of Nazism being treated lightly in a Hollywood movie (or cartoon!), especially one that was made at a time when the very real horrors of the concentration camps were underway far across the Atlantic. One argument goes that it amounts to trivialising the Holocaust; some things, we are told, should simply not be joked about.

Well, I disagree in a broader sense with that idea — I don’t think any subject, however ugly or distasteful, should lie outside the purview of humour — but in this case the nature of the comedy serves an obviously desirable function: it strips a pompous, self-important villain of his dignity.

Recently there was a comparable scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, where a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, the white-supremacist group, turns into farce when the members find that they can’t see properly through the little slits in their white hoods; ironically, these are the very costumes that they think make them look so enigmatic and awe-inspiring.

The scene drags on too long, but one can’t fault its intention: undermining evil by making it banal, then ridiculous. (Interestingly, the history of the KKK has a real-world equivalent for this: in the 1940s, the author William Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the group and passed on its code-words for use in a radio programme about Superman. As little children — including the children of mortified Klan members — began using the “secret words” in their games, the group’s air of mystery was diluted.)

It is useful to have good satirical depictions of this sort in cinema, because there have already been powerful, influential films that have depicted evil in attractive, glamorous terms. Two that readily come to mind are Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will — a document of Nazi rallies that begins with a stirring scene where Hitler is portrayed as a deity surveying his land from his plane before descending from the clouds to make his speeches — and DW Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation, which depicted the KKK in positive terms. The movies served different functions: Riefenstahl’s was explicit propaganda, made for the National Socialist Party, while Griffith — a Southerner who grew up with assumptions that we would consider very illiberal today — was probably capturing the zeitgeist of a particular age. But their ability to sway audiences, to make violence and intolerance seem appealing, can’t be denied.

What films like To Be or Not to Be do is to provide a necessary counterpoint by puncturing that balloon, and I’m thankful for them every time I see how fashionable it is for a certain demographic of Indian youngster (this includes a lot of management students, incidentally) to posture and claim fondness for Hitler’s Mein Kampf — a book that has long been a bestseller in India — or to express admiration for his “leadership qualities”.

The author is an independent journalist who writes on cinema and literature.