Went to see a Lubitsch double feature at Film Forum last night- The Shop Around the Corner, and To Be or Not To Be (the 1942 version, not the Mel Brooks remake). To Be or Not to Be was regarded as incredibly tasteless at the time, and the audience still inhales sharply when, Jack Benny, as the ham actor Joseph Tura, pretending to be the Nazi Col. Ehrhardt, says of concentration camps, "We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping." The movie is a broad farce, and a brilliant one, but what's really radical about it is that unlike most farces, it feels like it takes place in a recognizable universe. At no point do they sugarcoat what's going on in Poland at the time, and they trust the audience to keep laughing at a joke about a detachable beard even when torturers are in the background. Through the movie, I found that Polanski's The Pianist kept flashing back into my mind- while wildly different in tone, the two movies are grounded both in reality and the awareness of the absurdity of their situations. The chief joke and tragedy at the core of The Pianist is that Szpilman survives primarily not through his cunning, passion, or intelligence (his brother has all these things and disappeared to the camps without a trace), but through sheer luck and a kind of tenacious passivity. His real life struggle is different than the farcical troubles of the theater troupe in To Be, but you could see them going past each other on the bombed out streets of Warsaw.