To Be or Not to Be

Smashingly funny...This To Be or Not to Be scarcely misses a comic beat right from the opening sequence. Read full review

Very funny stuff, indeed.

Mel Brooks's To Be or Not To Be has the ingenious plot twists, the breathless comic cadences, the blithe spirit of a classic '40s comedy, and for a very good reason -- it's almost a scene-by-scene and line-by-line duplicate of Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be or Not To Be" of I942. To those who know and love the Jack Benny-Carole Lombard original, this may seem like sacrilege. But because the copy is so entertaining in its own right, it seems more a tribute than a rip-off. [19 Dec 1983, p.66]

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

The cast (including Brooks, Anne Brancroft, Christopher Lloyd, Tim Matheson and Oscar-nominee Charles Durning) does their best to keep the laughs flowing. Read full review

Johnson may not quite have Lubitsch's lightness of touch, but he puts an excellent cast through their paces with great verve, and the charm is as potent as ever. Read full review

To Be or Not To "Be works as well as a story as any Brooks film since "Young Frankenstein," and darned if there isn't a little sentiment involved as the impresario and his wife, after years of marriage, surprise each other by actually falling in love. Read full review

Brooks works overtime finding laughs more in line with his rambunctious kind of comedy...Only in Anne Bancroft's luscious, Lombard-light performance of Brooks' better (but parenthetically billed) half do you get a hint of this film's smart and stylish origin. Read full review

An extraordinarily faithful—though schmaltzy and ultimately pointless— 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 farce. Read full review

The plot is much the same as in the Ernst Lubitsch original, with everything played for laughs and Brooks at his funniest in impersonations of Nazis. What's missing is the relevance of the 1942 film, released while Germany occupied Poland. Read full review

If anything, the 1983 To Be or Not to Be is more tasteless, while a great deal less engaging, than the original. [16 Dec 1983, p.E20]

Brooks unfortunately is neither Brooks nor Benny, but a hesitant ghost of both. And Bancroft is no comedienne, just tired old Mrs. Robinson with a feather boa. Read full review

A mild farce - benign but not really very funny.

I can't remember another film that took so little care with the details of ambience: the cruddy sets and flat, underworked sound track drain any sense of life from the project, to the point where it looks like the cheapest kind of TV—canned theater. Read full review

The film only succeeds in establishing a remarkable new low in remakes. Read full review