Next up on the S&S list at #114 is this Ernst Lubitsch comedy-thriller (I really want to call it a screwball farce, but it’s more serious than that) WW2 spy movie, released in 1942 as the US entered into the war.

The movie begins in pre-war Poland, as a theatrical troupe is poised to put on productions of their new satirical play, “Gestapo,” in which Hitler and his Nazis look like a pack of idiots. We see the interplay between all the actors, with particular focus on the (married) lead actress and lead actor — she has a young, handsome admirer from the Polish Air Force, and she instructs him to meet her in the dressing room when her husband begins his “to be or not to be” soliloquy, leading to the amusing scene of him getting up and awkwardly making his way out of the audience as that speech begins, to the consternation of the actor (and even more so the second time it happens).

And then… Germany invades, and shit gets real. That Polish airman goes off to Britain, the actors are trying to keep their heads down, etc. But when a German spy makes off with a bunch of information from England, including the contacts of those Polish pilots serving in the RAF, that airman is sent back to Warsaw to try to intercept him before he gives the Germans the information.

And this brings us to the heart of the movie, where that actress is pulled into this intrigue because the airman had passed along a “secret code” to her, having told that spy to tell her “to be or not to be,” and so the spy is… well, one part gathering intelligence, one part trying to seduce her.

The airman meets up with the actors, the husband finds out about all of it, and various schemes are hatched, with complex plans-within-plans taking place, all in an effort to keep the information from the Germans and somehow get all these people out alive. There are twists and double-twists, and all the while there’s the backdrop of the actor trying to figure out how much his wife cheated on him.

It’s not consistently funny — hard for a movie with this many Nazis to be a laugh riot all the way through — but it is legitimately laugh-out-loud funny at places, and the characters, the writing, and the intricate plot are all great. So far, Lubitsch is three-for-three in my book.