To Be or Not to Be (Blu-ray)

As nervy as it is hilarious, this screwball masterpiece from Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise) stars Jack Benny (The Jack Benny Program) and, in her final screen appearance, Carole Lombard (My Man Godfrey) as husband-and-wife thespians in Nazi-occupied Warsaw who become caught up in a dangerous spy plot. TO BE OR NOT TO BE is a Hollywood film of the boldest black humor, which went into production soon after the U.S. entered World War II. Lubitsch manages to brilliantly balance political satire, romance, slapstick, and urgent wartime suspense in a comic high-wire act that has never been equaled.

• Restored 2K digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• Audio commentary from 2013 featuring film historian David Kalat
• Pinkus’s Shoe Palace, a 1916 German silent short directed by and starring Ernst Lubitsch, with a piano score by Donald Sosin
• Lubitsch le patron, a 2010 French documentary on the director’s career
• Two episodes of The Screen Guild Theater, a radio anthology series: Variety(1940), starring Jack Benny, Claudette Colbert, and Lubitsch, and To Be or Not to Be (1942), an adaptation of the film, starring William Powell, Diana Lewis, and Sig Ruman
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and, for the Blu-ray edition, a 1942 New York Times op-ed by Lubitsch