Bogart learns to love La Resistance: Casablanca vs To Have And Have Not

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casablanca is so goddamn contrived. i cannot for a moment believe in any of the stories - there's no romantic chemistry for a start and the lines are glibly tossed-off. 'here's looking at you kid' is almost physically painful by the 3rd time. the whole thing's a lumpen and completely alienating experience for me - only the actor who plays Louis has me in any way convinced

THAHN is otoh genius and the most fun you can have in a cinema and bogart/bacall are juuuuuust the best and YAY and 'what are you trying to do, guess her weight' is better than all of casablanca's lines put together

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48rz8udZBmQ

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Your job is to work out which one is which, and agree with me.

Anarchy reigns in ile. Or at least utter freedom from agreement with acoleuthic. Thus was it ever.

i cannot for a moment believe in any of the stories

Suspend your disbelief, you troglodyte.

Love Hawks, Bogie & Bacall, but the Big Sleep blew TH&HN away. btw you could see both in a Jersey City picture palace this weekend (and I've never seen Dark Passage):

http://loewsjersey.org/

Like the lady said about Hamlet: "I don't see why people admire that play so. It is nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together."

Can't believe lj voted 5 times

hawks knew how to tell stories, curtiz knew how to...point a camera?

the very situation of the characters in THAHN is so much more believable and relatable. casablanca they're either the wealthy owners of clubs, the police-chiefs, the stiff-as-posts resistance leaders. the plot relies upon a coincidence wrought from lack of storytelling imagination and there's a really unnecessary bit where no suspense occurs at all when bogart looks as though he's about to swindle the resistance duo out of their tickets and then pulls the gun on louis (this is all v silly and it's obvious what DIFFICULT MORAL DECISION he has to make).

THAHN's character ensemble is magical, things happen accidentally or synergistically, there's genuine suspense, blah blah blah. also the bad guys in casablanca are lame and the fat dude in THAHN is awesome (as is the silent guy)

god

i mean THAHN is basically world-weary sailor meets awesome impulsive gap-year student and they help some genuinely distressed/injured/tired/battle-scarred resistance types (with the occasional frisson of gallic seduction) make a daring escape, walter brennan does his thing, everything fits into place...

casablanca they're either the wealthy owners of clubs, the police-chiefs, the stiff-as-posts resistance leaders

or yvonne, who sleeps with renault to get her husband and herself out, and is aided by our hero
or carl the bartender who says 'honest? as honest as the day is long!'
plus peter fuckin lorre
plus claude fuckin raines <----------
sidney fuckin greenstreet
any number of epic lines
ok victor laszlo was wooden but he was supposed to be
the nazi colonel could have been better
i don't want to get into comparing ingrid bergman and lauren bacall, but either way no one loses
yes it is melodramatic and predictable
but it works magnificently

also i haven't seen th&hn so

lol

Yeah, and while we're at it -- what's up with that stupid story of Prometheus, anyway? An eagle comes and eats his liver every day and it grows back! Totally unbelievable!

that's a good analogy for the human condition. THAHN is an analogy for the duties humans have to each other, and a paean to escapism. casablanca is an analogy for unlikely love triangles

nuff

Moby-Dick: nut chases a big fish

nah that's all about man vs nature, doomed to never conquer what may consume him despite monomaniacal desire and thorough knowledge of environs, ya know the real hard-ass shit

doomed to never conquer what may consume him despite monomaniacal desire and thorough knowledge of environs

like u in this thread amirite

Had a long argumenet with a buddy yesterday with a Hawks-besotted buddy; I insisted that Cukor, Hathaway, Curtiz made as many good (and bad) films as Hawks. As much as I love about seven or eight of his movies, I'm kinda tired of the Hawks love, to be honest.

agh, ignore bad editing

of the Hawks I've seen, 2 or 3 are all-time great (THAHN, BUB, maybe The Big Sleep altho I need to see that again), one is great (Red River), His Girl Friday wasn't actually anything like it's cracked up to be and I still need to see Rio Bravo, still a good success rate

My friend (still in his twenties) confessed that he loves Hawks mostly because he wishes men and women talked like the characters in Hawks films. It's "mature" instead of mature.

gilbert adair said much the same abt art house audiences and rohmer. it doesn't make for bad films in either case.

His Girl Friday wasn't actually anything like it's cracked up to be

U H8 THE MOVIES

down ilx avenue we was goin 65 miles an hour ... can u imagine bumping into lj? opinions come rolling out like oranges.

lj, I am happy that you love THATH.

However, ILX has spoken and the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line. We prefer Casablanca, however silly and unbelievable it is (and it is silly and unbelievable), because those qualities do not override its other excellences.

also, you have gotten me to dl th&hn

I'm shocked to find myself mostly agreeing with LJ on these two, but it's not by much. Actually I think I like them equally as films, but Bacall gets me harder than Chinese algebra in TH&HN, as the saying goes.

confession time: saw THAHN on the big screen (at the NFT) and casablanca on an airplane

ban me

'his girl friday' is the most entertaining movie ever if you see it on the big screen -- pretty much just nonstop lols, and the most amazing cary grant performance there is -- even the way he moves is kind of hilarious. i used to think the serious bits slowed it down, but they worked for me last time i saw it.

has anyone actually read the hemingway novel 'to have and have not'? is it anything like the movie?

the really great hawks movie that no one talks about is the original 'scarface.' it's also the meanest and most atypical of his movies: still kind of bracingly harsh and violent, and not a wisecracking, boyish dame or lovable band of misfit professionals in sight.

I think Hathaway is a hack who made many more bad and mediocre movies than hawks.

I have the feeling you'd decided all this before actually even seeing this film. STICK IT TO THE CLASSIC FILM FAN GERONTOCRACY LOUIS, YUO ALONE CAN REWRITE FILM CRITICAL HISTORY!#@.

hawks knew how to tell stories, curtiz knew how to...point a camera?

This is really pretty sad and ignorant IMO.

not true. went into THAHN thinking 'well my friend's invited me to this and it might be ok' and had my mind blown. went into casablanca thinking 'this is meant to be awesome, please make my 30-hour plane journey more tolerable' and i guess it did at least do that

Maybe, but The other is a strong candidate for the most overrated film of all time. Your job is to work out which one is which, and agree with me. and suchlike doesn't come across like that, it comes across like your main motivation is to be ilx gadfly #1. This is probably why ppl are not engaging w you and just taking potshots for the most part.

only the actor who plays Louis has me in any way convinced

i am convinced as well ... that louis is trolling

next he'll be calling Verigo unbelievable and silly, which will put me in a slowly-I-turn lather.

I prefer romantic desperation to sassy seductions, so I don't think there's anything in the Hawks movie like Bergman balling her fist after she says "Kiss me as if it were the last time" to Bogart in Paris. Also, the Marseillaise scene makes me cry every time, and I won't even stand for The Star-Spangled Banner.

I think Hemingway made some joke about how there's almost nothing from his book in TH&HN. I would like to see it again, along with the fucking thousand other movies I'd like to rewatch. Does LJ know that Curtiz remade this movie in '50 w/ John Garfield?

love Scarface '32.

vertigo's stupid, never saw the big deal about it

also, "I am shocked...shocked" among the most-quoted character actor lines of all time.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Saturday, February 19, 2011 9:45 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

haha i only recently realized where this thing i have said lots of times came from

haven't seen either of these films in a long-ass time

even though bacall and bergman set new standards for screen beauty, they're both pretty far down my list of 'great movies', but 'casablanca' is better

I said upthread that I think Casablanca's a little overrated, and I'll stand by that. One Curtiz film I think is underrated is Mildred Pierce. It was a long time before I watched it--always assumed it'd be really stagy and drippy--and when I finally did, I was surprised by its weirdness, how it's much more of a noir than the soap opera I was expecting, and how artful the camerawork is.

my challops of the day: Bergman's performance in Casablanca (distracted, confused, which makes sense if you know the movie's back story) is one of her least persuasive.

Mildred Pierce is great, but is it really underrated?

As I said, I much preferred Carol Burnett's Mildred Fierce, after which the Crawford version can only seem a giggle. The Cain book is sumthin, lookin fwd to the Haynes miniseries.

I don't how you measure such things, by my sense is that Mildred Pierce is underrated--that what's great about has been overwhelmed by Crawford's persona, and that it's been reduced to caricature by things like the Carol Burnett parody (which I don't remember, but I'm sure it's great).

Well, but I've seen a major Crawford reevaluation in recent years: from renewed appreciation of her terrific no-frills performance in Daisy Kenyon to Denby's long essay a few months ago.

Also, the Marseillaise scene makes me cry every time

morbs! me too!

has anyone actually read the hemingway novel 'to have and have not'? is it anything like the movie?

It has been many years, but iirc this was kind of his attempt to hack out a crime novel to a) make some quick money and perhaps b) show his hardboiled imitators how it was really done. It doesn't come off as a sustained narrative, maybe because it was written as short stories for magazines. It is much wilder than the movie, very violent and macho -- not as tough as Hammett, but a good imitation of the imitators. All the World War II stuff in the movie is Hollywood, not Hemingway.

I've picked it up a few times to re-read, but the creepy 30's racism keeps putting me off.

Hawks claimed Hemingway told him the book was "junk," but HH was known to embellish the truth.

I don't how you measure such things, by my sense is that Mildred Pierce is underrated--that what's great about has been overwhelmed by Crawford's persona, and that it's been reduced to caricature by things like the Carol Burnett parody (which I don't remember, but I'm sure it's great).

― clemenza, Saturday, February 26, 2011 2:40 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

it's not really underrated. example: it's been adapted by todd haynes with kate winslett for hbo.

haven't read the book, but it's not a particularly interesting film, unless you specialize in a certain era of hollywood.

one of Crawford's most boring performances too.

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

Prior to climate change altering things everywhere, Casablanca has slightly higher average rainfall than Southern California does.