Did You See the Oscars?

I attended a school's fine arts event with a dear friend recently in San Francisco.  I chatted with a young married couple whose kid was in the show.  We started talking about movies and movie stars.  The husband said, "I didn't realize Shirley MacLaine was such a babe!"  He'd rented Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce, a comedy that earned MacLaine one of her Best Actress Oscar nominations as a happy hooker in Paris.  The husband knew the post-Terms of Endearment MacLaine.  I urged him to rent Billy Wilder's The Apartment and Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry.  This brings me to last month's Oscars telecast.  Seth MacFarlane is a handsome, talented guy.  Some of his moments were good.  But I felt that his comedy segments went on way too long.  When he announced the Oscar nominations on live TV, he was doing his comedy routine and I said to the screen, "Get to the nominations, Seth.  It's not about you!"  I pretty much felt the same thing watching him host.  He'd have been perfect to host the MTV Awards.  For the Oscars, he was a jovial middle-aged frat boy whose extended snarkiness made the show drag.  The producers, instead of trying to court an audience of 20-something males, should've kept the focus on films -- and the Hollywood history of films.  MacFarlane was more a Comedy Central roastmaster.  Tina Fey and Amy Poehler would've rocked it.

The opening bit with William Shatner in Star Trek attire started off well but went too long.  One reason why the MacFarlane material felt long is that millions of us hear it every day in repeats of Family Guy and American Dad! on television.  Basically he made his host stint a live-action version of his animated work. The Shatner bit was very American Dad!

If I was producer, I'd have cut that bit in half and brought William Shatner out later, in a tuxedo, to be a presenter.  I'd have had MacFarlane intro him as a castmember from Judgment at Nuremberg, the 1961 classic that got 11 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and two nominations for Best Actor.  Maxmilian Schell won for Best Actor for it. Shatner acted opposite the film's other Best Actor nominee -- Hollywood legend Spencer Tracy.

I would've kept highlights like the Charlize Theron number with Channing Tatum (who knew she was such an elegant dancer?).  I'd have dropped the "We Saw Your Boobs" number.  I expected Quagmire from Family Guy to pop out during that song and say "Giggity!"  I would've utilized the Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus instead in a better tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch.  He was a major force on Broadway and in Hollywood.

Barbra Streisand singing "The Way We Were" was lovely.  If I was producer, that would've been the beginning of the tribute.  It would've ended with something like this -- an iconic number that's referenced in every animated open of Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy.

In between, there could've been a medley of Hamlisch music from movies.  His Oscar nominated songs included "Through the Eyes of Love" from Ice Castles, "The Last Time I Felt Like This" from Same Time, Next Year, "Nobody Does It Better" from the James Bond adventure The Spy Who Loved Me, "Life Is What You Make It" written with Johnny Mercer for Kotch (Best Actor Oscar nomination for Walter Matthau, directed by Jack Lemmon) and "Surprise, Surprise" written for the movie version of A Chorus Line.  Dancers could've been given their moments to shine performing to the music he adapted for The Sting and his hip and groovy 1960s-flavored pop score for 2009 The Informant!  I would've ended the Hamlisch tribute with "One Singular Sensation" from A Chorus Line.

Kristin Chenoweth -- very talented.  But the long duet she sang with MacFarlane at the end was totally unnecessary.  Two minutes from that should've been given to the short "In Memoriam" video package.  The Academy should let the folks of Turner Classic Movies assemble those packages.  The 2013 video omitted Andy Griffith, who should have been a Best Actor nominee for slamming across one of the most blistering 1950s Hollywood performances as the manipulative TV star with dark political influence.

He was "Lonesome" Rhodes in 1957 Elia Kazan classic, A Face in the Crowd.

In my review on national radio, I'd hoped Griffith would've gotten a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his delightful, well-dressed curmudgeon role in 2007's Waitress.

Anatomy of a Murder racked up Oscar nominations for Best Picture of 1959, Best Director, Best Actor and two for Best Supporting Actor.  One of its stars -- Ben Gazzara.

He also starred in Husbands with Peter Falk and John Cassavetes.  Gazzara was omitted.  So was renowned Latina actress Lupe Ontiveros.  The Oscars were on ABC.  Lupe Ontiveros was in the cast of ABC's big hit series, Desperate Housewives.

Jack Nicholson was one of the top presenters of the night, helping to award Best Picture.  He got one of his Best Actor Oscars for As Good As It Gets.   Ms. Ontiveros had a funny key scene with Nicholson in that Oscar nominee for Best Picture of 1997.

Phyllis Diller, Larry Hagman and NFL star-turned-actor Alex Karras were also left out. I think the Oscars can be entertaining and current while also blending in a respect and acknowledgment of classic film art and artists.  They're broadcast globally.  It would've been cool to give some bits of history about and greetings to senior Oscar winners who are still with us.  Sisters Joan Fontaine (age 95) and Olivia de Havilland (age 96) are both Best Actress Academy Award winners.  Luise Rainer was the first person to win back-to-win Oscars for her 1936 and 1937 Best Actress performances.  She's now 103.  I'd have preferred a nod to them over the Seth MacFarlane joke about Lincoln being shot in the head. An Oscar moment I totally loved -- the Daniel Day-Lewis acceptance speech when he said that Meryl Streep was originally slated to play Lincoln.  Very funny.

I mentioned Shirley MacLaine at the top of this blog piece.  My other idea, if I was producer, would've been to invite stars of classic Best Picture winners to be presenters.  Like Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music), Rita Moreno (West Side Story) and Shirley MacLaine (Around the World in 80 Days, The Apartment and Terms of Endearment).  That might have been a nice and respectful way to connect the past and the present.  The producers for last month's Oscars are the same two men who produce NBC's Smash.  At times, the Oscars show felt like a Smash episode trying to appeal to the MTV Awards audience.  Just my opinion.  For the married guy in San Francisco, here's more babe footage of Shirley MacLaine.  It's the trailer from her madcap 1964 satire, What A Way To Go!  The festive Edith Head fashions make TV's Project Runway and the Oscars Red Carpet shows look like the "Anatevka" number from Fiddler on the Roof.  Enjoy.

So.  What did you think of the Oscars?

Kirstie Hires "Kramer"

I dig Kirstie Alley.  Going back to the early 1980s, I always noticed her when she was onscreen.  I thought she was a major babe.  Just like Lucille Ball, she was a babe who really sparkled as an actress when she was given comedy to do.  The proof started weekly on Cheers.  Since then, she's proven to be a Master of Reinvention.  She was a Dancing with the Stars highlight.  One night, a noted TV columnist friend invited me to a screening of a new 2005 Kirstie Alley sitcom for Showtime.  It was called Fat Actress.

She'd be playing a hot mess of a middle-aged Hollywood star no longer getting work because of her plus-size.  My columnist friend and I expected the show to be mediocre.  The entire audience was howling with laughter within the first ten minutes. Those two episodes were just so wrong that they were right.  Alley had the brass ovaries to get up there and totally lampoon her own image, her weight challenge and how network TV operates in Hollywood.  Her clueless character forged ahead through a series of show biz humiliations as she job hunts in a town that worships skinny women.  Those were two of the funniest sitcom episodes my friend and I had seen of any show that entire year.

I was sipping a Coke.  A scene with the frustrated Kirstie ordering too much food at a drive-thru made me do the DTST (Danny Thomas Spit Take) laugh.  You need to see those early episodes on DVD.  Especially the one with Mark Curry, formerly of Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, as the African-American NBC executive attracted to full-figured women.

Kirstie's coming back with another sitcom -- for TV Land.  She'll play a Broadway star whose world is turned upside down when her long lost son re-enters her life.  Former Seinfeld star, Michael Richards, returns to the sitcom scene as a cast member.

He has not been seen on TV much seen Seinfeld ended its run in 1998.  He had his own very short-lived sitcom after that.  Then, in late 2006, there was his widely-reported racial slur rant onstage in a comedy club. TMZ reported this.  The rant did not appear to be part of routine.  Black people in the audience were offended.  So were white folks.

I saw that comedy club footage.  If Michael Richards had stood on a corner in Compton, California, in parts of Chicago or in Newark, New Jersey and shouted "Nigger!" like that, he probably would've been in physical danger.  It was pretty raw and vile.  Now he's returning to TV in a project with two other former NBC sitcom stars.  The other is Rhea Perlman, once a Cheers co-star with Kirstie Alley.

I'm really interested to see how Michael Richards navigates his way through the early part of this new sitcom.  He'll play the Broadway star's limo driver.  With those three stars and with TV Land being a major channel, there will probably be publicity and interview opportunities for entertainment press.  How is he going to handle facing black and Latino members of the press?  Will he be available for press?  Will black and Latino members of the entertainment press want to interview him if he is available?  I add Latinos because, on Seinfeld,  his Kramer character stomped the flag of Puerto Rico after he accidentally set it on fire during the Puerto Rican Day Parade.  (Season 9, Episode 20)

Many Latinos in the New York area alone did not find that episode funny.  I didn't find that flag-business funny.  So many Latino viewers were irate that, as the New York Times reported in 1998, NBC had to apologize for the offensive episode.  Maybe all this business has blown over and Richards can breezily return to the world of sitcom work.  We'll see.  He did get on late night CBS after the TMZ reports broke and apologize, saying that he's got nothing against us "Afro-Americans."  For TV executives, that whole business has blown over obviously -- because he booked a good new gig.  I interviewed Michael Richards in WNYW's Good Day New York.  He was promoting a 1997 comedy movie called Trial and Error.  Lots of folks in the station came down to the studio to watch our live interview.  He was quite popular as "Kramer" at the time.  I'd like to interview him again and ask what he learned from that ugly comedy club incident and how it changed him.  If it did.

I hope the TV Land sitcom is a big hit for Kirstie Alley.  She makes me laugh.  A lot.

TV's Best Friend, Valerie Harper

"They wrote like playwrights."  ~Actress Valerie Harper last month on KPCC Radio in Southern California, praising the writers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show

The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the truly classic 1970s sitcom, made Valerie Harper a star.  She was America's Best Friend on that show.  We wanted to spend some of every Saturday night with the next door neighbor and number one gal pal to Mary Richards.  Not since Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz had there been such a fabulous female friendship on a sitcom.  As Rhoda Morgenstern, Harper gave us the quality of wisecracking loyal and straight-shooting buddy that we were used to seeing in classic Hollywood films played by such charismatic Oscar-nominated actresses as Eve Arden and Thelma Ritter.  When I was a Los Angeles kid dreaming of a television career in New York City, Rhoda Morgenstern was who I hoped most New Yorkers would be like.  I think, to a degree, I became like Rhoda when I did work and live in New York.  It was destiny.  My sister and I both attended Marquette University in Milwaukee.  The Midwest.  Remember what Rhoda once said to Mary about living in the Midwest?  "I thought with the cold weather, I'd keep better."  After we'd done our college time and were starting our new adult lives, my youngster sister and I lived in the same apartment building.  Just like the Morgenstern girls did on Valerie Harper's hit sitcom spin-off series.  Friends nicknamed us "Rhoda" and "Brenda."  When our mother visited from California, she and I had squabbles about my life like Rhoda and her mother did.

Mom:  "Isn't there any young woman that you've ever wanted to marry?"
Me:     "Yes.  Liza Minnelli."

Many years later, when I was a Manhattan resident, a friend set me up on a blind date.  My date, Franz, was a very tall and slim and reserved German.  And blond.  Really blond.  So blond he was almost invisible.  We met for a bite to eat one night in Greenwich Village.  About his youth in Germany, Franz said "I couldn't vait to get out of zee country.  It vas so...provincial.  I vent to Berlin."  I thought to myself, "OK...if this goes to a second date, I'm painting my fingernails green.  Like Liza in Cabaret."  Somehow we got onto the topic of favorite TV shows and Franz suddenly became animated.

"I loved Zee Mary Tyler Show!  Especially Rrrrrhoda Morgenstern!"

At that moment, the German and I had common turf.  And not by invasion.  We loved Rhoda.  After that he loosened up and told me about his early days in Berlin.  Franz entered an amateur talent contest with two friends.  They were in drag and lip synced.  I asked, "Who were you?"

He replied, "Diana Ross und zee Supremes.  I vas...Diana."  When a German man in drag sings "Stop! In the Name of Love," I bet it sounds more like a military order than a musical plea.

Me:      "Did you wear any special...make-up?"
Franz:  "Nein.  Eyeshadow, lipstick, wigs und gowns.  Matching gowns.  Lovely."

Then, with an obvious trace of lingering bitterness, he told me that they were very good but they lost the contest and the big money prize.  "We lost to a man spinning plates on sticks.  I am convinced zee contest vas fixed.  I know it vas fixed."

See?  That was exactly the kind of blind date Rhoda would've had.  I never saw Franz again.

When I heard Valerie Harper on KPCC that Wednesday morning, February 13th, she was so warm, witty, wise and generous in her praise of The Mary Tyler Moore Show cast and production team.  Her affection for them is in her new memoir, which she was promoting on the show.  It's entitled I, Rhoda.  I read some of it just last week in a San Francisco bookstore.  Here's the Golden Globe and Emmy-winner's I, Rhoda book cover.

I recently taped a TV interview with an author in New York City.  It airs next weekend.  I'll tell you about that later.  Deep in my heart, I admit there's a prayer that my performance will be so good that it'll lead to a regular job back on the East Coast.  After I'd browsed through Valerie Harper's book last week, I thought..."It would be so great if I could return like Rhoda and say 'New York, this is your last chance.'"

On the Feb. 13th KPCC "Take Two" news/talk show, Valerie Harper sounded energetic and carefree.  Today's news that she's stricken with terminal brain cancer breaks my heart.  In the late '90s, I hosted a live local nighttime cable show in New York.  She was a guest one night.  Besides loving her work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and her hit spin-off, Rhoda, I'm a fan of her other TV work like the adaptation of the Pulitizer Prize-winning play, The Shadow Box.  That 1980 network production co-starred Joanne Woodward and Christopher Plummer.  Paul Newman directed the drama.  Harper played Maggie, the wife confronting her husband's terminal illness.  She played the chic gal pal to Marsha Mason's character in the film version of Neil Simon's Broadway comedy, Chapter Two.  On Broadway, I saw TV's Rhoda play Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir.  She was excellent.  I want you to know that Valerie Harper was everything I hoped she'd be in person -- polite, funny, gracious, grateful to me and my TV crew.  That's the spirit that made her America's Best Friend.  I will certainly keep her in my prayers.

MOONLIGHTING Was Fun

I'm an uncle.  My two nephews are in the 9 to 12 age category.  One day, while we watched a clip of a certain action movie star on television, I said something that gave them both a case of slackjaw.  They looked at me with wide eyes and replied, "Really, Uncle Bobby?"  I had said, "Back in the 1980s, Bruce Willis had hair, he starred on a TV series...and he was funny."  Those were the days.  Before Die Hard movie stardom.

 Early March in 1985, the series Moonlighting premiered on ABC.  Cybill Shepherd recharged her career doing snappy, rapid-fire banter opposite Willis.  It was banter inspired by the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell rhythm in the 1940 classic, His Girl Friday.  She played ex-fashion model Maddie Hayes.  He was lovable, wisecracking detective David Addison.  Together, they ran the Blue Moon private detective agency in Los Angeles.  The two leads clicked, they had chemistry, the comedy made it "must-see" TV.  I can remember going to work the next day and hearing -- or often saying -- "Did you see Moonlighting last night?"  This show became one of my favorite 1980s TV series.  I really dug Bruce Willis' comedy skills.  I miss those Moonlighting days before his honest and warm grin turned into a post-Die Hard über-macho action movie star smirk.  When movie audiences made John McClane an action movie icon worthy of sequels, Willis seemed to tighten up and take himself too seriously.  He was excellent in the first Die Hard.  He had a touch of the David Addison looseness and humor we saw on ABC.

David was half goofus, half regular guy, a good friend and a really good detective.

The scripts were smart, surprising and ripe with pop culture references for babyboomers.  Willis became the new "It" dude of TV.  He was so entertaining to watch.  He even came up with a rock music alter ego.  As a veejay in the late '80s, I introduced his "Bruno Radolini" music video several times on VH1.  One of my favorite Moonlighting episodes was a valentine to the film noir crime classics -- like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.  The episode, "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice," switches over to black and white....AND...Hollywood legend Orson Welles made a cameo appearance.  I loved the 1940s big band number Cybill Shepherd sang in that episode.  It included a hair salute to the former Mrs. Orson Welles -- Rita Hayworth, star of Gilda.

Moonlighting premiered this week in 1985.  We got 66 episodes.  I remained loyal to Maddie Hayes, David Addison and their secretary, Agnes DiPesto, for all five seasons.

The quality and inventiveness of this hour-long weekly series made it a complicated production behind the scenes.  Throw network executive demands and actors' personalities into the mix.  We loved David and Maddie's bickering.  We could see their romantic attraction to each other even if they couldn't.  That gave the show a nice screwball comedy sexual tension.  Writers were stymied when they had to come up with a way to blend Cybill Shepherd's real life and increasingly obvious pregnancy into the scripts.  But they did it.  Good writers are a blessing.  Also, during the run of the ABC series, Willis shot his way to 1988 movie stardom in the first Die Hard tale.  The rest is box office history.  Except for the sequel released last month.  It died hard because it was killed by the critics.  I think Bruce Willis is now in production on Die Hard 6:  Get Me My Reading Glasses.  His vintage comedy charm graced last year's Moonrise Kingdom.   One day, I'll show Moonlighting episodes on DVD to my nephews.  I hope they dig the TV Bruce as much as I did.  This series, created by Glenn Gordon Caron, was a winner.

I Miss Madeline Kahn

This is for Oscar, my buddy.  Recently, he messaged me that a big snub regarding that Hollywood golden boy called "Oscar" is that Madeline Kahn did not get a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for her fabulousness as the controlling and annoying Eunice in the screwball comedy, What's Up, Doc?  In her 1972 feature film debut, for director Peter Bogdanovich, she made movie history as one of the few people (if not the only one) who stole scenes from superstar leading lady, Barbra Streisand.

Madeline Kahn was marvelous.  As the stiff and uptight fianceé to Ryan O'Neal's Howard Bannister, you could have hung freshly-ironed business shirts on her hairdo.

Audiences loved her.  The love affair continued.  She added two Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations to her list of career achievements after she made her big screen debut as Eunice.  The first time I sat in a movie theater to see What's Up, Doc?, I looked at Madeline Kahn and vividly recall saying to myself, "There's that really funny actress I saw in film class!"  One of my favorite university teachers and courses was the Film as Journalism class I took.  James W. Arnold, a former newspaper film critic, taught the class.  He was terrific.  The professor taught me how to look at films in a fresh and deeper way and to discover the spirit in them.  He showed us Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries.  Then he devoted a class to short subjects.  He began by screening a parody of Ingmar Bergman classics.  It was called De Düva:  The Dove.  This 1968 short featured an unknown actress named Madeline Kahn.  Our packed 1970s college classroom howled with laughter at her comic acting.  Here's the short subject. Click onto the link.

https://youtu.be/c3JEIQk4mZQ.

Kahn's star quality and extraordinary comic gifts were evident in that brief cigar-smoking role.  The Dove got an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Subject.

Directors Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich had the ability to distill the essence of Madeline Kahn, the same way Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor did with actress/singer Judy Garland.  One of Kahn's Oscar nominations came for her spoof of Marlene Dietrich in 1974's Blazing Saddles.  In a riff on Dietrich's sexy saloon entertainer in 1939's classic western, Destry Rides Again, Kahn was hysterically funny as Lili Von Shtupp.   Her "I'm Tired" number in Mel Brooks' western is one of the comedy high points of 1970s Hollywood movies.  Madeline Kahn was a bright screen comedienne.

Who can forget Miss Lili offering the new sheriff more schnitzengrüben for breakfast?

Not since Mae West in the 1930s had any American actress made sex so funny.  Another comedy she did for Mel Brooks was his brilliant Young Frankenstein, also in 1974.

Again, audiences erupted into laughter at her work as Elizabeth, the doctor's no-sex-before-marriage rich fianceé.  Her attitude changes when she's kidnapped by Dr. Frankenstein's gifted monster.  Kahn's operatic training came in handy here.

Her other Oscar nomination came for Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon.  In this 1973 hit, she was the shapely 1930s hootchie mama, Miss Trixie Delight.  She's out to use her "big tits" to hook a sugar daddy during the hard times of the Great Depression.  We laugh at this floozie carnival dancer, yet she also breaks our heart.  Trixie realizes that she doesn't have a very long expiration date.  Like Judy Holliday, Best Actress Oscar winner for Born Yesterday, the film version of Holliday's Broadway success, Kahn could have you doubled over with laughter at her ditziness and then move you with the depth of her poignant, revealing moments.  We see that so clearly in the light of Paper Moon.

Ovarian cancer took her away from us when she was only 57.  Madeline Kahn's final big screen performance graced an independent film not known by many.  But the dramatic performance is one of her best and makes you wish we could've had more time with her.  She's a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the 1999 movie Judy Berlin.

Edie Falco, of TV's The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie, has the title role.  Ms. Falco is very fine indeed as the schoolteacher romantically attracted to Arthur, the school's principal.  Arthur is unhappily married to Alice.  Madeline Kahn is quite memorable and touching as Alice.  After I saw the film, hers was the performance that lingered in my heart and mind.

See it for yourself.  Judy Berlin is available on DVD.  Madeline Kahn -- what an original.

Obscure Movie Quote

From  THE SOUND OF MUSIC as written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola:

"Leave the nun.  Take the cannoli."

On TO BE OR NOT TO BE (1942)

"What a Shylock you would have been."  ~A compliment in TO BE OR NOT TO BE.

"All the world's a stage."  A troupe of Polish actors knows this is a famous quote from William Shakespeare's As You Like It.  This troupe will be thrust into a deeper, darker realization of Shakespeare's line when it winds up in a theatre of war.  This 1942 comedy, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, makes me laugh out loud and there's one scene so beautifully acted in a tense situation so cleverly written that it puts tears in my eyes.  We meet this troupe in Warsaw in the summer of 1939.  Warsaw is still at peace.

The stars of the company are The Turas.  There's Joseph...probably making The Bard spin in his grave like a pinwheel with his portrayal of Hamlet...and his glamorous wife, Maria.  She has a special place in her heart for the fans.  Especially the young male fans.

Lubitsch guided Jack Benny and Carole Lombard through performances that rank among their best film work.  This film obviously had a great impact on young Mel Brooks when he saw it.  Watch Mel's The Producers.  The "Heil myself" line that he gave to the actor playing Hitler in the "Springtime for Hitler" number?  He didn't borrow that business from To Be or Not To Be.  He stole it from the opening scenes of this Lubitsch classic.

Carole Lombard and Jack Benny shine as flirty Maria and the jealous Joseph.  The company is in rehearsals for "Gestapo," a satirical play about the Nazis.

When the political climate changes, the government is threatened by the arts.  The company is ordered not to do the new play because "...it might offend Hitler."  That means insecure Joseph puts on tights again to take to the stage as Hamlet.

His "To be or not to be" soliloquy is the cue for a handsome young pilot to visit Mrs. Tura in her dressing room.  Robert Stack played the brave, courtly and damn cute pilot.

Joseph wants to become famous for his wooden Hamlet.  Maria wants to be wooed by a handsome pilot.  The pilot wants to romance Poland's famous stage actress.  The company wants to lampoon Hitler onstage.  And Greenberg wants to play Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

I love Greenberg.  He's a stock actor, a regular guy who is in the profession for the love of the art.  He's not obsessed with becoming a star.  He loves acting.  He loves fellow actors.  He loves the classics.  He loves comedy.  As Greenberg says, "A laugh is nothing to be sneezed at."  To a company member who's always too theatrical and over the top in his performances, Greenberg says "What you are, I wouldn't eat."  His best friend in the company, Bronski, has been cast as Hitler in the satirical "Gestapo."

Bronski knows of his friend's desire to play Shylock.  When Greenberg first recites some of the famous "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" speech, he and Bronski are backstage in period costumes and carrying spears.  When he does it a second time, they're both outside shoveling snow.  The climate is very different in Poland then.  Twenty minutes into the comedy, war is declared.  That's the inciting incident.  It changes the actors lives and sets them, as a company, on a different course.  It's the Arts vs Bigotry.  The actors risk their lives -- and still get laughs -- as they hurl themselves into the war effort utilizing their skills as actors to fight the Nazis.  An escape is needed.  All their lives are in danger.  They are trapped in their theater.  A plan is hatched.  Greenberg is the only one who can make the plan work.  Without hesitation, he accepts the challenge.  The challenge is -- to make a dream come true in a nightmare situation.  He will do Shylock's speech again.  The third time is a charm.

Greenberg is "cast" to do Shylock for the worst audience imaginable.  The theater is packed with critics who could kill his performance.  Literally.  Greenberg and company are in a theater full of Nazis.  Also attending that particular performance is The Füehrer.

In the corridor, company members in costumes from "Gestapo" blend in with clueless Nazis.  Greenberg causes a ruckus as a Jewish dissident.  Totally in the moment and with absolute fearlessness, he delivers a most passionate performance of Shylock's "If you prick us, do we need bleed?" speech to Bronski as Hitler.  There's Greenberg -- in modern dress, in a theater, using his real life to inform his most important performance ever -- and he's brilliant.  He gives urgency, fire and life to Shakespeare.  He makes the old dialogue sound new.  Greenberg shows why Shakespeare's work lives on.

His commitment to his craft, his love for the arts and his fellow actors are at their peak here.  His performance is so good that it saves lives.  Today, so many young acting hopefuls seem mainly concerned with getting on a Red Carpet, making a fashion statement and going to the party afterwards.  They're not concerned with craft.  They don't have a touch of Greenberg.  He was about doing the work.  Taking a risk.  Greenberg's bravery and passion in that scene always put tears in my eyes.  There's so much richness in that inspired scene.  It works on more than one level.  There's the bravery of Greenberg, the brilliance of the actor's being "in the moment" while putting Shakespeare in a contemporary setting, the cleverness of that acting troupe and the proof that the arts can save lives.  Theater is a great, sharp weapon against ignorance and hate.  So is film.

Felix Bressart played Greenberg.  He graced a couple of other Lubitsch classics.  In Ninotchka, he played one of the Russian comrades to Greta Garbo's lead charcter.

The movie musical remake of that was Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.  Bressart and James Stewart were co-workers in The Shop Around the Corner.

The musical remake of that was In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson.  Then it was remade in the 1990s as You've Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.  To Be or Not To Be was also remade.  Mel Brooks starred with his wife, Anne Bancroft, in the Mr. and Mrs. Tura roles for the 1983 remake of the same name.

The remake brought Charles Durning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

Shakespeare is referenced at least three times in the Lubitsch original with his Hamlet, Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice.  A mint print of To Be or Not To Be is now available thanks to the Criterion Collection.  Check this one out.  The first 20 minutes alone have more laughs, wit, originality and energy than some 2-hour modern comedies I've paid money to see.  Today, young actresses who want to do screen comedy should study Carole Lombard.  She was a master at it.  I love Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be.

I bet Shakespeare would've loved it too.  Thank you, Criterion.