So, yeah. Casablanca is right out of the running for Most Romantic Movie Ever. (Using of course, the highly idiosyncratic, but obviously correct, Andrea criteria.) In fact, watching it now, middle-aged and wiser-to-the-ways-of-the-heart Andrea (as opposed to even crazier and more dysfunctional teenaged Andrea) has been quite won over to Mr Barma's position. Namely that Ilse is just a cheating, needy whore who fucks over two guys (one of whom is both a righteous hero and a man who would obviously do anything for her) right good. But we aren't supposed to notice that, 'cause she looks like Ingrid Bergman. Also, that when Rick sends her off with her husband at the end of the movie, it's less a grand romantic sacrifice--which is how I remembered it--than a sign of Rick's having been somehow ennobled by Victor's good example to finally do a good, decent, right thing. Plus, he's probably figured out that if he goes off with Ilse, she's gonna cheat on him too, later if not sooner.
Also? Oh my goodness, the hoyay in this film. Most of the male characters have, at the least, a crush on Rick. I mean, think about it. Why for example, does *Sam* run off to North Africa with Rick? He wasn't working for him in Paris. He was just an employee in the bar Rick hung out in. Okay, so the Nazis were occupying Paris and, I dunno, I have no idea how they felt towards black American piano players, so maybe getting out of Dodge was advisable, but unless there's something the movie ain't tellin' us, Sam could just go back home to Chicago or New Orleans or wherever. (I, of course, like to think there is something the movie ain't telling us and that Sam shot a man just to see him die, so therefore he can't go back to America either, and it's this plus the man-love that makes him pack up his suitcase and go with Rick. But, then, I make up fictional life stories for my fellow bus passengers, so you know how I am.)
Now, none of this is intended as a dis at Casablanca which is a very entertaining movie, full of classic dialogue. It's not, however, the big touching romance it is reputed to be. I cannot even endorse Mr Barma's opinion that the true romance in this movie is Sascha's love for Yvonne. Mr Barma maintains that the fact that Sascha remains devoted to Yvonne despite the fact that she's screwing Rick and throwing herself at random Germans is proof of true love. I maintain that it's more likely proof he has deep psychological issues and only goes for chicks who repeatedly reject him.
So then, in other classic movie news, Mr Barma and I watched Dark Passage. Because obviously it was Bogart night in Shangri-Lowell. OMG. What a fucked up film. I must say, I was disappointed in the ending/climax because I was expecting some major out-of-left-field plot twist and...no. The identity of the real killer was pretty anticlimactic. But Lauren Bacall (Irene) as prisoner-groupie (who knew they had those way back in the 40s?), the totally emasculated Bob who's engaged to a woman he hates but who still keeps courting Irene and dropping by to *not* have sex (since she can easily hide Vincent/Humphrey Bogart in her bedroom because "Bob won't look in there!"), the weird lonely cab driver who reads people's faces and, apparently, hooks them up with discredited and unlicensed plastic surgeons...it goes on. Totally weirdness.
The whole plastic surgery thing put me in mind of Minority Report and Tom Cruise's blackmarket eyeball replacement by the shady doc. I was wondering if that was in fact a homage to Dark Passage, but Mr Indemnity tells me that the practicing-medicine-without-a-license surgeon cosmetically operating on a fugitive in skeezy conditions is a whole trope and is in a lot of movies, so perhaps not.
But my favorite, favorite part of Dark Passage? That as Vincent wakes up from his surgery and notices his jacket (!) is now off, the doc tells him that oh, yeah, he had to remove it so he could borrow some skin from Vincent's armpit. Okay, if you don't know enough to plan ahead and put your patient in a johnny *before* the operation starts, the board of registration probably should have pulled your license, y'know? Love it!
xoxo
11 comments:
Speaking as someone born in the 1940s...What I've always enjoyed about Casablanca isn't the romance (never mind the gender) but the script and the cinematography. Call it denial but there it is.
Not to mention all the cards our parents held from us.
Now I'll have to see Dark Passage again, confound you!
Does the truth of love have to depend on whether or not its object is worthy? Cmon, deal Sascha a break. So he has the hots for a hot rack. I like to believe, based on his boundless cheerfulness, that it wasn't meant to be interpreted as a wrong thing that he's smitten with her, even if she may likely be incubating more than her fair share of protozoa. (cue Renault's line about her constituting a "second front"). Sometime love is just like that. (Or not, I'm not saying you're not wrong ;-).
I think you have one thing wrong in your completely incorrect dissing of Casablanca: I'm 90% sure that the bar in Paris was owned by Rick and in addition that Sam owned part of the bar with him, just like he did the bar in Casablanca.
You probably fell asleep during that part, like I did during Mishima tonight. :-P
1.) Again, I'm not dissing Casablanca. It's a good movie.
2.)However, "I'm not saying you're not wrong." <--if you untangle that double negative, I do believe *I* am being dissed :-PPPPP
3.)I totally missed the part about Rick and Sam having a prior professional relationship. Damn. That cuts down on the hoyay. A little. Can we all agree though that Sam probably shot a man just to see him die? No?
hahaha
In reference to La Belle Aurore, there's a line from Rick explaining that some french guy has insisted they drink all the champagne because he's not going to let the German's drink it. (And there's no piano in the place that I've ever noticed).
All references to Rick's past, consistently reviewed in conversations with Renault, Strasser and etc. refer to mercenary stints in Ethopia and Spain, but never saloonkeeping in Paris or elsewhere. I know that's pretty thin, but Rick and his place in Paris, where the little whore laid regularly herself out within just a month or two of her reported husband's demise, looked everything like a bon vivant's place, not someone needing to spend the required time running a bar.
And, as for the double negative, it's not something not to be sorry about, which is to say, a complete breakdown of my linguistic faculties and completely unintended.
Which is to say, and I hate to say it, I'm teasing about Sascha and Yvonne, and I just like the line: "Yvonne, I love you, but he pays me".
Ok, maybe the piano was in La Belle Aurore... Now I recall Sam playing ATGB. But the proprietor is indeed referenced in the screenplay (Henri) and it's not Rick's place. (Here's one reference: http://www.filmsite.org/casa3.html)
I watched Casblanca for the first time a couple weeks ago. I was expecting this grandly romantic movie.
I was very disappointed, while it was a good movie, it wasnt the grand experience I wanted. I found it hard to follow at first, then finding Ilse to be as you said a cheating needy whore, I was again very disappointed.
Give me Gone With The Wind over this anyday...lol. Yeah, I know, Scarlett is a manipulative brat...but she does grow up a bit, she has to...and well, there is Rhett. :) And, yeah, it does last 4 hours. But its well worth every minute. :)
Casablanca is most interesting when you watch the recovery of Rick's soul and ignore the Bergman eye candy and all that nonsense about it being "romantic". Bogart's character fell from grace, (they make a point of not telling you how or why), and he's in this fetid purgatory where human life is cheap and getting cheaper every day.
Even so, Rick is someone to whom every other man in the picture seems to aspire, and I've always taken Rick's exceptional adoration of Victor Laszlo, and Laszlo's distinct lack of hero worship for Rick in return, as the real message of the film. Rick is not an admirable character. He pays off corrupt, fascist police officials he regularly watches (and enables through use of his club) statutorially rape innocent girls, he thinks nothing to stand by while he knows an acquaintence is to be taken away and killed, and we're given only that he's not as bad as Ferrari as the sole hint that he's not the most reprehensible he could possibly be.
Casablanca was churned out on an intense shooting schedule in '42 in order to motivate and speed the US entry into the war in Europe, and the pretense of sex is just window dressing over the real issues of isolationism and responsibility.
I prefer to see it that Rick knows what a whore Isla is, (he woke up on that day on the platform in Paris), and he has spent his entire time in Casablanca dreading what a bankrupt soul he has become. I like to think of his night of drinking as continued penance for fleeing Paris while men like Laszlo did not. He dreads Ilsa's arrival because he knows she will force him to choose, and he's so far gone he can barely stand it. Betraying Laszlo himself is the only depth to which he hasn't sunk.
But, yeah, Ingrid does look good...
This is fun :-) It's like online book club, but with movies.
I think what's really really interesting is *why* so many people find this such a grandly romantic movie or touching love story when at least a few of us agree that it is not, that the "love story" part of the film is the story of a woman who very, very soon after the reported death of her (near-saintly!) husband (in a concentration camp!) apparently goes blithely out looking for a new guy to party with and screw (excuse me, *fall in love with*)--and while, yes, we all deal with grief in different ways, the fact that Ilse won't tell Rick anything about her past, besides serving as a convenient plot contrivance,also implies that she knows damn well she's doing something most people would find shameful--and then when she finds out he isn't dead, cowardly dumps the other guy without a word of explanation rather than tell him the painful truth, leaving him heartbroken and bitter, then when they meet up again, blithely decides again to cheat on her still near-saintly husband and perhaps leave him. Yup, that's, um, touching, okay.
So *why* do so many people find it so? All joking aside, it's not just because Ingrid Bergman is so pretty and kind of innocent-looking. I think there's some unconscious buying into that whole soulmate crappola/myth, where supposedly someone is your perfect lurrrvvvve and so you must be with them, no matter how much doing so would destroy anyone else's life, and in fact, you'd be stoopid *not* to, because your perfect lurrrvvve only comes along once and you can't throw it away.
Something like that.
See, this is what I meant about the cards our parents dealt us: well, my parents anyhow, kids.
Think of the 12-15 years before the release of Casablanca as an era in which pragmatic survival trumped everything, then think of Rick as the archetype of someone who is jolted out of his survival mode by something bigger than himself. Think of Ilse as a nice p...excuse me...as almost hedonistic small change who can't really measure up to the new challenge. And all this is what "the greatest generation" did *not* want us knowing. Better to call it "romance" than a morality play.
I'll have to go watch it again (haven't for at least a month) to organise what I want to say about the cinematography.
Book Club? We ought to have a film club to screen and chew over these films. But yes, fun.
So, if you're saying that Casablanca isn't in the running for Most Romantic Movie Ever--or even Romantic at all, given the M-A rules of portraying "true romance" on screen--are there any movies that meet your base threshold of requirements of romance???
I actually think you're being unfair to Ilse. My memory (and you know how inaccurate that can be) is that it's made explicit in the film that Ilse fell out of love with Victor Laszlo long before she hooked up with Rick, but that she didn't leave him because 1) he was a saint so she couldn't just dump his boring but internationally sanctified saintly ass and 2) she also couldn't dump him because he needed her emotional support to go about his saintly business saving millions of people, and helping him save those millions was more important to Ilse than her own personal feelings.
Thus it was no surprise that once she thought he'd gone off to the big saintly convention in the sky, she hooked up with a far less saintly (but far less boring) Rick asap, cause she'd been wanting to find someone more exciting for years.
Plus, don't forget it was during the decades of the Hollywood Production Code, so Ilse couldn't have just had a fling with Victor or knowingly engaged in adultery with Rick, they had to go through those marital and pseudo-death convolutions to "allow" her to boink both of them. Without those required machinations, Ilse relationship choices might have been quite different.
In any case, Ilse looks like Ingrid Bergman, so, frankly, I'm more than willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I think she behaved perfectly respectably--well, other than when she dumped Rick without explanation on the Paris train platform, but if that ain't the final straw for Humphrey Bogart, it sure wouldn't be for me, either. :-)
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