The huge obstacles that made Ernst Lubitsch's anti-Nazi comedy To Be Or Not To Be a failure in 1942 are almost invisible today. Many decades later, watching To Be Or Not To Be, the viewer sees the director's audacity, the confidence he places in his audience, and his insistence on joy and laughter in the face of widespread tragedy. Under the circumstances of 1942, that was probably more than any director could expect from a nation faced with a real, emotional and existential emergency.

It's not that Lubitsch didn't have warnings in advance. As the movie makes clear, Hitler's forces were already running rampant in Europe. The Axis powers (Germany along with Japan and Italy) were attacking and threatening their neighbors and making it clear that their intention was to dominate the world. Lubitsch's own regular collaborator, the playwright and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who had helped Lubitsch create some of his most outrageous, sometimes shocking comedies, chose not to work on the screenplay. He later said, "I didn't have it in me, to make gags about the Nazis, in 1941."

Lubitsch was also in a unique position as the creator of the film. Every other major picture he directed had been derived or adapted from an existing story or play. He even had success re-making his own silent pictures as talkies, but To Be Or Not To Be was primarily Lubitsch's original idea. He was a German-born Jew, a naturalized American citizen, and an enormous success as a director both in Germany and Hollywood but even so, there were those who doubted that even he could make a comedy about Nazis work.

Still, Lubitsch had no way of knowing how badly things could go between the time he started work on the picture, and when it was finally released. He had already lost his chosen lead actress, Miriam Hopkins, who opted out because she didn't like the way her part was written. This was a real problem because Lubitsch was making the film for United Artists, which was a contract-based producing partnership, rather than a conventional studio with its own production facilities. That meant that each United Artists picture had to be financed individually, based on investors believing it could turn a profit. In the end, Lubitsch got lucky, because his personal friend Carole Lombard happened to hear about Hopkins dropping out. Lombard had always wanted to work for Lubitsch so, when she signed on, the financing was no longer a problem.

When Lubitsch started shooting in November of 1941, he was looking at a reasonable proposition. He had Lombard and the popular comedian Jack Benny (best known for his radio work, but coming off what had been his most successful movie, Charley's Aunt, in 1941) as married and feuding actors in occupied Poland, who wind up leading their theater company in anti-Nazi espionage. The great shock came with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Within a week, president Franklin Roosevelt had signed formal declarations of war against Japan, Germany and Italy. Lubitsch was no longer satirizing a faraway conflict and a potential threat, but instead a shooting war, and an engaged enemy.

Lubitsch still managed to finish his production, wrapping just before Christmas, 1941, but there was terrible news to come. Almost immediately after finishing the film Carole Lombard, whose own growing interest in politics had led to her ask Lubitsch to cast her in To Be Or Not To Be, was recruited to help sell war bonds. These were certified United States securities, sold to the public to raise money for the war effort. Lombard was a leading supporter of President Roosevelt, and was thrilled to be one of the first Hollywood stars asked to travel the country on a bond selling tour. Lombard was a huge success. She was flying back to California from a record-setting war bond rally in her home state of Indiana when her plane crashed into a mountain in Nevada on January 16, 1942. It was among the most devastating events in the history of Hollywood up to that time. Carole Lombard, just 33 years old, at the peak of her success, wife of the superstar actor Clark Gable and beloved by her peers and millions of fans, was gone. She was, arguably, the first famous casualty of the American home front.

This was too much for Ernst Lubitsch's picture to overcome. When To Be Or Not To Be opened in March, 1942, there was some praise for Lombard's performance, but almost universal disgust toward Lubitsch and the film. The New York Times called it "callous and macabre," leading a chorus of negative reviews. The mourning for Carole Lombard did not translate into ticket sales.

Lubitsch, for the only time in his career, wrote letters and articles for newspapers defending the film and his approach to it, but to little effect. United Artists wound up using the film as a tax write-off, claiming in court that its treatment of Nazism made it unmarketable, and designating it as a financial "salvage operation."

Lubitsch, who died in 1947 at 55 after his sixth heart attack, never lived to see To Be Or Not To Be, become a unique and universally acclaimed classic. It's recognized now as one of Carole Lombard's best films, certainly Jack Benny's best, and one of the handful that make Lubitsch one of the most admired directors ever. It may be the most definite example of the sometimes elusive but celebrated quality known as "the Lubitsch touch." It's what makes his characters, who might be overwhelmed by the horror and inhumanity around them, believe always in romance and laughter and the hope that things will, in the end, be better.