Here’s perhaps the quintessential example of the “Lubitsch touch” — writer-director Ernst Lubitsch’s art of balancing low humor and high stakes, through a mix of sophistication, wit and elegance. To Be or Not to Be, a comedy about the Nazi onslaught during World War II, never loses track of its prime target: searing social commentary. As the Nazis invade Poland, Joseph and Maria Tura (Benny and Lombard), Poland’s top stage actors, prepare a play satirizing life under the Gestapo. Due to political pressures, the troupe proceeds instead with a production of Hamlet. That play’s famous soliloquy also poses the existential question that prompts them to aid the Resistance: to be or not to be a hero, to be or not a passive victim. It showed at the Plaza Theatre in March 1942, two months after Lombard died in a plane crash while returning from a tour promoting war bonds. — Laura Emerick