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

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)