This is a thread about CASABLANCA because it is utterly awesome and the best black and white film ever.

WHAT AM I SAYING???

"This gun is pointed straight at your heart"

"That is my least vulnerable point"

Me: "Casablanca is on BBC2"
Dad:"We're not watching that old ..."
Me: "I've never seen it before"
Dad:"Now you have to see this film. It's a fantastic (endless monolog until the film starts...)"

I am still blown away by Casablanca. I think it's in my top 5. Ingrid Bergman is sex on legs on the movie, and she never shows more than an ankle. She never looked better.

"You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together . . . and blow. "

i have no idea what those mean.

blah blah blah, fucking see it.

youre not really a film critic are you.

henry miller otm too.

-- :| (...), January 5th, 2005.

Uhm... regular cheques would appear to say so.

Citizen Kane is a technical tour de force, but I don't get the same emotional hit that from it that I do Casablanca. I always end up with a tear or two at the end of the Curtiz movie, and Bogart's Rick is a more complex character than Welles' Kane. He's a guy broken in half through loss, something that touches virtually everyone and makes for a strong emotional core. The characters in Casablanca are really what makes it a classic. Finding a script, acting or characterisation like that is hard - whether today or whether almost sixty five years ago.

If you want a complex breakdown of Casablanca give me a paid book contract, which would be my third. Ta.

= you are saying you liked the movie, and nothing else. that is not good criticism.

Best colour film? The Godfather 1/2.

X^n post:
And the extremely sympathetic villian/rival played by Claude Rains in Notorious (after all, his mother is the real villian) is a much more interesting character than that goody-two-shoes Victor Laszlo.

Citizen Kane is a technical tour de force, but I don't get the same emotional hit that from it that I do Casablanca. I always end up with a tear or two at the end of the Curtiz movie, and Bogart's Rick is a more complex character than Welles' Kane. He's a guy broken in half through loss, something that touches virtually everyone and makes for a strong emotional core. The characters in Casablanca are really what makes it a classic. Finding a script, acting or characterisation like that is hard - whether today or whether almost sixty five years ago.

if you had time to write that then why you couldn't you have done so at the beginning? this board suffers from yours and others usual 'X is Y cos i say so' route, as does your reputation as a critic. i can't believe you get any satisfaction out of that. be surprised if anyone else does either. just some friendly advice from the amateur critics critic...

I have a love of classic Hollywood too though.

CC, perhaps you would prefer the feel-good remake starring Michael Richards, Citizen Kramer.

Actually my favorite output of those bald Epstein twins are the Hollywood novels of son and nephew Leslie.

P.S. Best avante garde? Any movie with the legend, "directed by Jack Hill".

*made in the 1980s.

A movie that was advertised on our schools' religious notices board, back in 1969...

NB to CC72: csblnca WAS a faceless blockbuster when it came out; it was precisely that. i'm surprised you haven't read the stories of its creation.. it barely got made; other people were going to play the lead roles until the last moments; no one expected it to do more than the other junk the studios cranked out by the bucketload; it was just one of those movies where everything clicked and the years added to people's appreciation of it (its politics have held up, for one thing, as someone mentioned above). so don't get too snotty about "faceless hollywood"!

avant-garde: Of, relating to, or being part of an innovative group, especially one in the arts.

Best film with innovative techniques used then, yes?

Star Wars then, surely?

Jack Hill is a legend. Check out "Switchblade Sisters", "Spider Baby", "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown".

Dario Argento from 1969 to 1987 is a pretty good bet. Mario Bava as well. Dellamorte Dellamore is worth seeing too.

A Boy and His Dog is an apocalyptic classic. I did a thread on that before.

B-cinema is always pretty interesting when done well. William Castle, Tod Browning, Val Lewton...

um

Dario Argento from 1969 to 1987 is a pretty good bet.
why

Mario Bava as well.
why

Dellamorte Dellamore is worth seeing too.
why

B-cinema is always pretty interesting when done well.
give reasons

Really dude, learn to tell Rains from Conrad Veidt. You guys talk about analog recordings the way you do b&w?

"Casablanca" is arguably a great MOVIE -- iconic, beloved, still works its magic (I've likely seen it 11 or 12 times myself) -- but to claim it as some great work of cinema borders on laughable. For all the smart punchy lines the Epstein brothers wrote, there's howlers like "Victor, please don't go to the underground meeting tonight."

It was a happy accident, as described above, and just look at the scenes before Rick's entrance to see what a hoary, jerrybuilt melodrama it might've been.

Isabella Rossellini says her mom often wondered aloud why fans always wanted to talk about "that Bogart picture."

i do like conrad vedit that said. but why this film, not 'the spy in black' or whatever. there are lots of films like 'casablanca' really. (like 'pepe le moko', mofo).

CafePress does better turnaround than that, dude.

You know, I'm still gonna say it's a masterpiece of cinema because of how it all blends, the set, the atmosphere, the romance, the tension...

If cinema is entertainment then Casablanca remains one its masterpieces. Sit and beat your meat over Godard all you want.

P.S. Ned, quite possibly. It's about how long it's gonna take me to get it completed. The first one should be out sooner.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...) (webmail), January 5th, 2005 3:11 PM. (link)

Pshh. I'm saying NOWT!

just like the chanel ads with the girl that walks around in golden water! you know those? way superior to casablanca, and well worth seeing.

ps: yum ;)

BZZZZZT!!!!

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
WHAT AM I SAYING???
-- mark grout (mark.grou...), January 5th, 2005 6:35 AM. (mark grout)

that you're Calum?

TS: Louie, This Could be the Start of a Beautiful Friendship vs. Sebastian, Would You Please Come Inside?

Notorious wins again.

Sam, if it's December 1941 in
Casablanca, what time is it in New
York?

SAM
Uh, my watch stopped.

RICK
I bet they're asleep in New York.
I'll bet they're asleep all over
America.

then dealing with the emotional residue of bitterness that many Americans felt for Europe following WWI would be an important task.

I think 'Sunrise' is the best B&W film, BTW, though I love 'The Third Man'. Something about 'Citizen Kane' irks me, FWIW. I think I prefer 'The Magnificent Ambersons'.

I recommend Dog Star Man

It is perhaps the ultimate anti-auteur film in that it was really a giant fluke

or in that Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman are very different from Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland

Something about 'Citizen Kane' irks me, FWIW. I think I prefer 'The Magnificent Ambersons'.
OTM. I always thought CK was a little-cold blooded and OW hated his character too much. But the older and more Kane-like I get myself, I now see it as a God-like Fassbinderian statement of: I Love My Character, Therefore I Must Torture Him.

There is a lot of potency to Casablanca, and it was quite obviously a call for America to wake up and go to war - rightly in this case. You can, at the end of the day, analyse films to death (I do it too), but I feel a movie lives or dies - at the end of the day - on how entertaining it is.

I just watched it the other day and despite knowing much of the screenplay almost by heart, I still find it funny and touching.

you seem to have this wrong. The Third Man is the film that plays to Europeans' feelings of superiority wrt America. Casablanca, released a year after America entered the war, is the film for Americans to imagine they were doing the right thing all along.

P.S. Casablanca was actually commissioned and written before America went to war.

This is a very interesting account of the making of 'Casablanca'.

I'm not a film buff. Not seen the Ambersons. The debate is about my level, so I'm here.

OK?

The play on which the movie is based was written before America went to war. It also failed to cast Strasser as particularly evil, per this site. The site also says that Howard Koch sought to emphasize the propaganda value of the story in developing the screenplay. But the script, essentially written by committee, was unfinished when production started in May '42, six month after America entered the war, and, though it's not completely clear, this interview suggests that Koch screenwriters considered the script to be written after American entered the war. Bergman and the writers didn't know for sure until well into production which guy she was going to end up with (which actually explains my problem with Bergman's performance/character).

Someone was asking about French verbs on your thread yesterday and i linked it. If you'd like my identity, you're more than welcome to it.

gabbnebb's right about the who ends up with whom at the end part. If I recall correctly, the 'beginning of a beautiful friendship' scene was shot weeks after principal photography was over.

So now that we've outed the Eco within, do we have to say that, dispite it's obvious flaws, we've thought about it some more and we do like Casablanca after all, to show we are not slaves to the things we have read written by famous critics?

Why ever not?

TS Victor Laszlo vs. Laszlo Lowenstein vs. Laszlo Kovacs (I) vs. Laszlo Kovacs (II)

To each his own then...

- Fabulous photography!!! Moody, striking, atmospheric, dramatic - the whole ball of wax.

- The plot is total cornball, but the pacing and dialogue are so crisp that you never have time to dwell on the silliness of it all. Each vignette is a perfect little bon-bon of entertainment. No waste. No chewing necessary.

- Claude Rains was having a ball and so were the scriptwriters for him. Every line he spoke was a gem. Probably a commentary on Hollywood studios in there.

- Not a good scenery-chewing Nazi to be found anywhere, just the ho-hum cardboard kind.

- It is very rainy and foggy in Morrocco. Who knew?

"Ninochka"
"Andrei Rubylev"
"Broken Blossoms"
"Pandora's Box"
"Orphans of the Storm"
that film w/Dirk Bogarde where he's a homosexual doctor who gets blackmailed (heh, sorry, bad memory)
"Sabrina"
"Valley of Song"
"Kind Hearts and Coronets"
"Passport to Piml1co"
"Night of the Demon"

That's eleven, but never mind, and I'm not even getting into Ford or Kurosawa films, either.

So obviously, I don't think it's the best black & white film ever, though I do like it quite a lot.

I don't really give a shit about what "name" critics think, and am curious as to why you keep bolstering your arguments by bringing these people's opinions in, c*l*m.

Regarding films as "quotable" is a bit james brown-edited magazine-ist for me, but I suppose if I were no think of the most quotable film, it would be "Scarface"

http://www.thehollywoodnews.com/images3/edisonposter.jpg

That's eleven, but never mind
Why does anyone like 'Sabrina'?
I was gonna say, there's an obvious one to remove if you want an even ten.

Trouble in Paradise
Search! - Any movie involving Edward Everett Horton and gondolas.

(xpost - please tell me that movie is real)

I sincerely hope that's next. I nominate the five of the seven Sternberg-Dietrich collabs I've seen.

No. What's it called?

Vampyr
The Philadelphia Story
M
The Big Sleep
L'Age d'Or
The Man Who Knew Too Much
A Canterbury Tale
Throne of Blood
Peter Ibbetson
Alphaville

I like the implication in the title that Black & White films are somehow inferior to their Colour cousins. That's LadCrit for you.

tracer, wanna read an AMAZING book on the making of a movie? devil's candy by julie salomom on the making of bonfire of the vanities. just finished it last night. soooooo good.

xpost

my old college roommate once told me "yeah, i saw 'citizen kane' and i liked it. it seemed really cool, not like those other black and white movies at all." i still don't know whether to be touched or appalled.

through a glass darkly
tokyo story
ordet
battleship potemkin
vivre sa vie
shadows
cleo from 5 to 7
ikiru
city lights
earth

casablanca has a great screenplay, but it is just your typical hollywood film of the time. it is not ground-breaking, it is not amazing.

how many hollywood films of the time have ingrid bergman and humphrey bogart?!?!?!?!?!

The Marseillaise scene always gets me too.

Somebody wrote a volume of short stories 10-15 years ago about the fates of Great Movie Characters after the films ended. Never read it, but reviews said his "Casablanca" sequel had Rick and Renault becoming lovers, and Ilsa dying in the plane crash with Dag Hammarskjold...

why the quotes?

xpost:
Pretty hard to be super-Borgesian, Miguel.

Ha! I never imagined... Is it any less arbitrary and peculiar than his criticism?

xpost:
By day, he is a mild blind librarian...

Not a champion lepidopterist, eh?

"Count Alexey Kirillovitch Vronsky, auteur of Showgirls"

Casablanca is still great though!

Dario Argento and Mario Bava are not so much 'avant-garde' as incapable of telling a story in 'classical Hollywood cinema'-style - this is both their strength and weakness, obv ('Suspiria ' is frightening at least partly because it so swiftly flees from narrative 'common-sense')

srsly haters, if you don't tear up at the Marseillaise scene, u probly like Joe Biden.

good job on the calum revive

it's definitely a great movie tho

im sorry. i just hate ingrid bergman.

i've always imagined a great rick & louis witty action sequel, fucking shit up in algiers before operation torch.

How long do you think their beautiful friendship lasted?

as soon as Rick realized that vaseline was involved.

they stay best friends for the rest of the war, and then agree to take a boat to Marseille together. Rick is waiting on the docks as the boat is just about to leave and he's handed a note from Louis that says he won't be coming with him after all and gives no explanation.

years later, Rick owns a bar on Fire Island. out of the blue one day Louis walks in and their passionate affair is commenced anew.

FIN

I like this, but, yeah, it's overrated.

Curtiz seems to have been an odd character. I don't really know that much about him except for the bit in "Hollywood" where they describe him filming the flood scene in "Noah's Ark", and in his frantic desire to make the scene real or memorable or w/e, he put a load of extras into a giant water tank, with a load of animals and poured gallons of water into it. IIRC he killed a couple of extras making the film. Pretty fucked up, eh? His filmography:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002031/

Has a few striking films (Casablanca, Noah's Ark, angels w/Dirty Faces, Female) including 2 of my top "I wish it was on DVD" titles - "Noah's Ark" itself and "The Egyptian". I don't recall seeing most of the titles. Was he a hack who struck lucky a few times, or are there a bunch of films there I shd look out for?

I've watched "Casablanca" a couple of times since C-man kicked this off and I must say I enjoyed it loads both times it's grown on me even more. I think it is one of the best films, and one I'd always want on hand so I can watch it when the fancy takes me.

The list I made upthread would probably now go:

"Ninochka"
"Andrei Rubylev"
"Broken Blossoms" "Way Down East"
"Pandora's Box""Beggars of Life"
"Orphans of the Storm"
"Victim" "Sunset Blvd"
"Sabrina"
"Valley of Song"
"Kind Hearts and Coronets"
"Passport to Piml1co"
"Night of the Demon" "42nd Street"

...tho obv the "black and white" thing is a bit facile. And IIRC bits of "Way Down East" were colour when it came out.

"Sabrina" "Hotel Imperial"

There was a big public screening of this two days ago in a big outdoor square in the heart of what is probably the most commercial part of Toronto, complete with outright hideous sound quality and a stack of lights blocking my view. Seeing it again for the first time since was like 12, these conditions probably are a good way to ruin a filmgoing experience (My friend brought me along with him), and while yes it is very good, I don't see what about it puts it so clearly ahead of the other handful of canonical Classic Hollywood 'best film evers'. Also, best black and white film ever seems like a not so good best-ever category.

As I discovered in class a few years ago, much of its reputation with the young (one of the few "old movies" you'll find in their DVD collections) rests on its enshrinement as a proto-Pulp Fiction: lotsa hip patter with actors good enough to deliver it.

yeah when ice craem was ragging on old movies on that one thread this was one that really stood out as an exeption to the rule - i think it can really be enjoyed by people who dont 'get' old movies without much distance at all

why are you talking about "ice cream" and this "rule" as if it's anything close to "right"

anyway i think its rep with young people comes from being saturated in the culture for 65+ years and being actually very good.

i dont mean its 'right' but its...honest? like how many dramas pre casablanca would you recommend to people who dont watch black & white movies?

it's honestly stupid imo

to someone who refused to watch (if that's what is meant by "don't watch") b&w movies i'd just tell them to rent sin city or some bullshit because that's probably the only b&w movie they'd like anyway, if they have that attitude

only if you dont take it at face value!

xp thats not what i meant by 'dont watch' - i mean, most people dont watch old movies

and that casablanca has an appeal, like alfred was saying, that the vast majority of movies of its era lack

anyway i think ice cream's "argument" was that old movie acting is theatrical and not natural so therefore it's lame. maybe those two points are true but it doesn't make those movies lame.

that the vast majority of movies in this era lack too xpost

hat casablanca has an appeal, like alfred was saying, that the vast majority of movies of its era lack

Well, no, that's not true. Its sheer ubiquity has contributed to its popularity too. The collected works of Howard Hawks and lots of film noir play well to the younger crowd.

i do too, & i think his -point- was that creates a distance b/w the film & the contemporary viewer which isnt so quite much present in casablanca - im not saying that a lot of this isnt because we've been 'told' its good, but i think a lot more people would be down for casablanca than say citizen kane, for the reasons alfred says - bogart + bergmann, etc, are kind of timeless in that movie

xps

because the vast majority of movies from any era are not that great, welcome to the world.

i love this movie. but cmon, its prominent place in the cultural firmament is due to a lot of management, not just its qualities. lots of movies have what casablanca has.

what a lot of them don't have is speed and economy, it's a very fast and breezy watch

xps

what a lot of them don't have is speed and economy, it's a very fast and breezy watch

this. it's also not a genre movie.

My Mam is totally obsessed with France and French in general and loves the French National Anthem, and one Christmas we were all watching this on tv, Mam fast asleep as she usually is from about fifteen minutes into any movie, and when it gets to the Marseillaise bit, she kind of sleepwalk sings along, and not just lying there, sitting upright, eyes closed fist swaying top of her lungs. The second the song is over she's slumped right back as though nothing ever happened. It was pretty surreal.

it's also sentimental as fuck, which always sells.

ok so i guess my point is, in terms of prominent exceptions to a prominent idea (that old movies suck), casablancas one of the first places id point as an exception

yeah there are tons of more obscure film noir type movies that are 'cool' but not in the traditional your-dad-likes-it sense that casablanca is

I love that line about throwing beautiful women away, what is it?

i love this movie. i think it's great because it has pretty much everything you want to see in a movie and it packages it really really really well.

'You shouldn't throw away women like that, Rick; some day they may be scarce.'

xpost

SO FUNNY

yeah, the writing in this is way way up there

i hate to gush but there is something kind of magical about this movie, on the level of trying a handful of different things in one story and succeeding at all of them, the 'witty' characters are witty, the 'exciting' plot is exciting, the 'romance' really is romantic, the 'politics' are very politically real, etc.

Michael Curtiz on ILF

"If he gets a word in, it will be a major Italian victory."

I love how Paul Henreid looks and acts like a Ronald Colman smoothie yet is supposed to be a concentration camp (and torture!) survivor.

I love how Paul Henreid looks and acts like a Ronald Colman smoothie yet is supposed to be a concentration camp (and torture!) survivor.

Dude. Its Victor fucking Laszlo. He is The Man.

http://badattitudes.com/MT/paul_henreid.jpg

i get a quasi pre-echo of the manchurian candidate from him, like war and torture have hollowed him out and he's just a vessel for a set of ideas that he may not completely understand. the fact that he's a handsome eurosmoothie just makes him seem even more insane and unloveable.

and the terry lennox character from the long goodbye, too, someone very damaged. i always imagine lots of scars under the white suits.

wow

i get a quasi pre-echo of the manchurian candidate from him, like war and torture have hollowed him out and he's just a vessel for a set of ideas that he may not completely understand. the fact that he's a handsome eurosmoothie just makes him seem even more insane and unloveable.

This sounds so convincing that I want to believe it, but, unfortunately, Henreid's performance doesn't carry this weight (as Lawrence Harvey and Sinatra did in TMC). I always found it hard to believe that the audience is supposed to sympathize with Ingrid Bergman for foregoing a life with Reeee-ck for early burial alongside this mummy with a noble cause.

"Production Code requirements," blah blah blah.

I'd have to watch it again but that actually shifted my whole idea of that character about six feet to the left

I always found him a bit unfathomable, and vaguely unlikable.

xps fighting nazis, it's important.

...ha well we're REALLY supposed to believe the guy is the lynchpin in the entire global antifascist effort! still, not many movies sell 'sacrifice' convincingly.

It's enough that Curtiz and Henreid suggest that Lazlo (can one imagine calling him Victor even after knowing him for years?) is fully aware his wife is fooling around.

NOBODY gets what they WANT in the movie but the AUDIENCE gets to be FREE do you SEE

nice, brief analysis of play-to-script here:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2013/02/understanding-screenwriting-105-django-unchained-amour-banjo-on-my-knee-and-more/

The 1980 Charles Bronson/J. Lee Thompson remake Caboblanco is coming to blu. ILX only mentions it once, and only then because of a copy/paste of Jerry Goldsmith's IMDb resume. Anyone seen it? Bad, or hilari-bad?

@OscopeLabs
CASABLANCA, one of the greatest films of all time, came out 75 years ago today. What's your favorite quote?

@labuzamovies
"Sam, play that song about the guy and his sled, Rosebud!"

(btw gen release was actually 74y ago)

I haven't called it a criminally overrated hill of crap beans itt yet, so here goes

but everybody's having such a good time

imago, why do you hate fun?

(btw, I stand by my initial post itt.)

Orson Welles loved it -- sort of!

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/01/31/reluctant-enthusiast-orson-welles-casablanca/

It's a good film and all, but Casablanca wouldn't even make my Top 100 for B&W movies.

Funnily enough, I watched it on Monday for the first time in years. Not my favorite Bergman performance. I was struck this time by the ease with which Curtiz shoots the scene b/w Ilsa and Sam: it's rare to see a period film in which a beloved white woman talks casually to a black man. Also, Rick includes Sam in the champagne toast, even pours him a glass.

A couple of Curtiz films around '50 are similarly generous to characters played by the Afro-Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez: The Breaking Point and Young Man with a Horn.

Claude Rains's last-minute transformation from opportunistic jerk to hero is such a classic bit of old-school acting and charisma

sweetnessheart, what watch?

ten watch.

such much?

Huh, always thought it was "such watch?"

that's how i recall it

Rains drops
such watch

I believe it's such much watch

Super Borges just made an appearance on another thread.