Реферат: Mel Brooks As Jewish Comedian Essay Research

Shultz: Erhardt: What idiot gave the order to close the Bronski’s theater?

Schultz: You did, sir. Erhardt: Open it up immediately. And once and for all

stop blaming everything that goes wrong on me (To Be or Not To Be). After being

warned to stop making jokes about Hitler, Erhardt promises, "No. Never,

never, never again, [emphasis added]" strange words to hear from a nazi.

Although this movie is not about Jews, there are a few Jewish characters and

encounters. Bronski hides a Jewish family in his theater’s cellar and during the

course of the movie, they’re number increases. At one point, the intelligence

agent goes to the theater to find his lover, Bronski’s wife. The Jewish women

hiding there tells him "You know that big house on Posen Street? Well don’t

go there, it’s Gestapo headquarters," before actually telling where she was

staying (To Be or Not To Be). At the end of the movie, they dress up all the

Jews hiding in the cellar (closer to 20 than the 3 who originally hid out in the

cellar) as clowns to have them run through the aisle (in the middle of a

performance for Hitler) to a truck to safety. One old lady panics in the aisle,

surrounded by Nazis. To save the old lady, another clown runs up to them and

pins an oversized yellow star, yelling "Juden!," this causes an

enormous laughter from the Nazi audience. To stall the Gestapo, Brooks dresses

up as Hitler, and listens to a Jewish actor perform the "Hath not a Jew

eyes" speech from Merchant of Venice. To Be or Not To Be appears to be

Brooks’s final way of coping with his lack of combat in WWII. While he has The

Producers make a play in which they portray the Nazis comically, the ultimate

message is that the two Jews in the movie still find them to be patently

offensive, and therefore, worthy of some form of respect. In To Be or Not To Be

he makes the Nazis into purely comical characters, and this is a step further

than Brooks went in The Producers. However, this simply may be because at the

point of To Be or Not To Be, Brooks was well into his career as an established

moviemaker, so he had more freedom to be offensive. Unfortunately, To Be or Not

To Be ended the golden age of Mel Brooks movies, at least from a specifically