To Be or Not to Be is a 1942 American black comedy film, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, and featuring Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges and Sig Ruman.

The plot concerns a troupe of actors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who use their abilities at disguise and acting to fool the occupying troops.

[7] In 1996, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

"[8][9] The well-known stars of a Warsaw theater company, including "ham" Joseph Tura and wife Maria, are rehearsing Gestapo, a satirical play.

That night, when the company performs Hamlet, with Joseph in the title role, one actor, Bronski, commiserates with colleague Greenberg about always being spear carriers.

Maria receives an admiring letter from Lieutenant Stanislav Sobinski; she invites him to visit her in her dressing room that night when Joseph begins his "To be, or not to be" speech.

Sobinski leaves to join the Polish division of the Royal Air Force (RAF), and the actors hide as Warsaw is bombed.

After giving Joseph the list of Polish resistance fighters' loved ones, Siletsky becomes suspicious and mentions Sobinski's message for Maria and that "To be or not to be" signals their rendezvous.

Acting as the head of Hitler's guard, Joseph demands to know what Greenberg wants, giving the actor his chance to deliver Shylock's speech, ending with "if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?!"

When Joseph is asked by the press what reward he would like for saving the underground movement, Maria asserts that he wants to play Hamlet.

Benny, thrilled that a director of Lubitsch's caliber had been thinking of him while writing it, accepted the role immediately.

For Benny's costar, the studio and Lubitsch decided on Miriam Hopkins, whose career had been faltering in recent years.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that it was "hard to imagine how any one can take, without batting an eye, a shattering air raid upon Warsaw right after a sequence of farce or the spectacle of Mr. Benny playing a comedy scene with a Gestapo corpse.

"[12] The Philadelphia Inquirer agreed, calling the film "a callous, tasteless effort to find fun in the bombing of Warsaw.

"[15] John Mosher of The New Yorker also praised the film, writing "That comedy could be planted in Warsaw at the time of its fall, of its conquest by the Nazis, and not seem too incongruous to be endured is a Lubitsch triumph.

In 1943, the critic Mildred Martin reviewed another of Lubitsch's films in The Philadelphia Inquirer and referred derogatively to his German birth and his comedy about Nazis in Poland.

Lubitsch responded by publishing an open letter to the newspaper in which he wrote, What I have satirized in this picture are the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology.

I believe it can be and so do the audience which I observed during a screening of To Be or Not to Be; but this is a matter of debate and everyone is entitled to his point of view, but it is certainly a far cry from the Berlin-born director who finds fun in the bombing of Warsaw.