“Joseph Tura: [disguised as Colonel Ehrhardt] I can’t tell you how delighted we are to have you here.
Siletsky: May I say, my dear Colonel, that it’s good to breathe the air of the Gestapo again. You know, you’re quite famous in London, Colonel. They call you Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.
Joseph Tura: Haha. Yes, yes… we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping.”

Whenever Godwin’s Law is invoked and comments, events or personalities are compared with the Nazis, the go-to movie clip is always the closing speech from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). It’s undoubtedly a powerful moment and a key film, but when it comes to American war-time suspicion of Hitler and National Socialism, for me Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) is far more effective and absorbing.

It’s a screwball comedy with farcical set-pieces set in contemporary occupied Poland. At times it verges on the ‘Allo ‘Allo school of Nazi presentation, but here it’s counterbalanced by a deeply personal and affecting depiction of the Jewish population of Warsaw. A troupe of actors including two stars of the Polish stage (Maria and Joseph Tura) played by Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, are preparing a play that criticises the Nazis when Hitler invades. The play is cancelled and Maria’s lover, a flying ace, escapes to England. Sometime later, the troupe has fallen on hard times under the Nazis, but the arrival of a Nazi spy brings them into a liaison with the resistance. The actors use the Nazi uniforms from the cancelled play to try to lead the spy into a trap and to try to subvert the authority of the local Gestapo officers.

There’s a joy to every scene, especially with the bantering interplay between Lombard and Benny, and it is a measure of the quality of the direction that this joy never eclipses an undercurrent of deep contempt towards the occupation. The Nazis are somehow simultaneously sinister and ridiculous (as they should be) and the film never strays too far down the Chaplin sentimental route and never becomes distractingly didactic. The moments to real profundity come, appropriately for its theatrical theme, from Shakespeare with Shylock’s key speech put to great effect.

It’s funny, brave and scathing, everything you want a comedy of this type to be. Watch in a double bill with The Great Dictator.