Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942)

By showing a group of artists managing to do what many then thought virtually impossible --defeating the Nazis -- Lubitsch was demonstrating the power or artistry and intelligence over brute force, of laughter over terror, of humanity over cruelty.
--Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, 2018).

An hour later, of even if you've just seen it for the sixth time, I defy you to tell me the plot of To Be or Not to Be. It's absolutely impossible
--Francois Truffaut.

Lubitsch is one of my favorite directors and the only reason I have not written more about him is that his movies are so multilayered and complex that it is extremely difficult to convey with words their effect on one.  To Be or Not to Be is no exception: a spy movie, a satire of Hitler and Nazis, a romance, a love triangle, a black comedy, a film about theatre etc.  At one point Jack Benny, playing Polish actor Joseph Tura in disguise as Nazi spy Professor Siletsky, asks a Nazi general ("so they call me concentration camp Erhard?") if he has ever heard of that great Polish actor Joseph Tura.  Erhard thinks for a minute and then says, "I saw him once before the war:  what he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland."  This line is amusing, yes, but it is delivered with such gusto by actor Sig Ruman that one is more horrified than amused; this film was released only two months after Pearl Harbor.

Lubitsch himself was Jewish, as was star Jack Benny, writer Edwin Justus Mayer and producer Alexander Korda.  The word "Jew" was not allowed by the production code at that point but Mayer and Lubitsch made it clear what the Nazis were up to, especially when Polish troupe actor Greenberg, played by Jewish Felix Bressart, was caught by the Nazis (actually some of the other actors in the troupe playing Nazis with actors who were playing real Nazis for the film ) gives Shylock's speech from "The Merchant of Venice."  Carole Lombard, who plays Maria Tura beautifully and intelligently, died in a plane crash before the movie was released; the film is very much of its time but also transcends it, telling a story relevant today, about dealing with the tyranny of those who think that the end justifies the means.