To Be or Not to Be

Mel Brooks and his wife Anne Bancroft co-star in this funny remake of a 1942 comedy of the same title, based on a story by Ernst Lubitsch and Melchior Lengyel about a down-and-out Warsaw theater troupe who save the Polish resistance fighters from the SS in World War II. Frederick Bronski (Brooks) leads a struggling theatrical company that offers anything -- from excerpts of Hamlet to stock vaudeville -- if it will pull in an audience. Unknown to Frederick, his wife Anna Bronski (Anne Bancroft) starts up an extra-marital interest in a Polish pilot (Tim Matheson) that could lead to a large-scale disaster. The pilot unknowingly reveals the names of the Bronskis and several resistance fighters to an SS spy (Jos? Ferrer), and by the time he finds out what he has done, he is in London, so he is forced to return surreptitiously to Warsaw as fast as he can to stop the list of names from landing in the hands of the SS chief (Charles Durning). Once the theater troupe is called in to help on this mission, the comedy begins in earnest with the actors donning the guise of Nazis, and Anna seguing into "seductions" of the SS spy and his chief as a part of their battle plan.