Posted on 02/17/2023 9:37:25 PM PST by Saije
When Warner Brothers’ movie, “Casablanca,” was released nationally on Jan. 23, 1943, to coincide with a war-time meeting of President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the same city, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that “The Warners . . . have a picture that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.” After 80 years, the iconic film remains a masterpiece and, in my totally subjective estimation, simply the greatest movie ever made.
I can still remember when I was in law school the Vogue Theater in St. Matthews showing “Casablanca” like it was a first-run movie. The packed house, as in earlier generations, was held spellbound by this compelling, World War II-era good-versus-evil saga with dozens of unforgettable characters with a red-hot romance as an extra “added attraction.” People around me sang out loud the soaring “Le Marseillaise,” spontaneously begun on screen by Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) to drown out the Germans’ “Die Wacht am Rhein” after the Nazis had commandeered a piano at Rick’s Café Americain. If you’re not moved by perhaps the most riveting single scene in any American film, well, you might need to go see a good cardiologist.
“Casablanca” won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1943, along with Oscars for Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Best Screenplay (Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch). That nominees Humphrey Bogart (“Rick”) and Claude Rains (“Captain Renault”) didn’t win Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, is still shockingly unfathomable.
(Excerpt) Read more at kentucky.com ...
***When I was in my teens in the sixties I had a white dinner jacket.***
White dinner jackets became the rage in the early 1960s when the camera panned around and showed a man setting at a gambling table lighting a cigarette and he said the works....”BOND! James Bond.”
There’s also a line by Isla where she asks “the “boy” on the piano” to play the song.
The most brilliant part of that scene was that it was designed to lead Americans to believe the French were on our side (as did the “Sahara” movie released the same year). The movie was released a couple of months after French troops had killed Americans landing in French North Africa.
At least in “Kelly’s Heroes” (released 25 years after the war ended) when Carroll O’Connor’s character is mobbed by French civilians and an aide tells him they think he’s de Gaulle, he points out the French aren’t even in the war...
You have to view “Casablanca” and other movies from that era as what they were: Propaganda movies designed to make entry into the European war palatable to an American public that was about to lose countless sons in a struggle between two evils (Hitler and Stalin). As part of that, Stalin was transformed into “Uncle Joe” (and our government and media continued to collude in hiding his mass murder in Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states).
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/winter/feature/in-casablanca-madeleine-lebeau-became-forever-the-face-french-resistance
I love that scene. Lebeau and her husband Marcel the roulette dealer weren’t the only singers who had escaped the Nazis. That to me makes it such a real and passionate scene.
I also love the fact that they wanted to use the Horst Wessel song for the Germans but didn’t because it was copyrighted and they were worried that lawyers would come after them.
Right - really just a different time altogether. It presents a problem in making new movies from WWII or earlier; the segregated military didn’t allow blacks (or women) in combat (though some ended up involuntarily involved), and as those demographics are now the target of the film industry, they have to get creative.
ok...this is my last post and ill leave you alone!!...lol. This is a 5 minute clip from Casablanca...a young Bulgarian newly wed is desparate to leave there and get to America....but she has to sleep with the Police Captain to get an exit visa...and goes to Rick for advice...
I don’t know if Casablanca is the best movie ever made, but if being able to watch a movie dozens of times and still be entertained is key, then my vote is for “The Burbs”. Tim Conway’s “The Longshot” is a close second.
You may be on to something remember how the used clips from old movies to make Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.
Remake Casablanca the same way with clips of Biden.
My daughter was horrified at the scene where John Wayne takes Maureen O'Hara over his knee and spanks her.
129 posts and not one mention of the song made Casablanca, Casablanca. As time goes by was written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931 and used in a play called “Everybody’s Welcome”.
In the early 1990s I did some extensive reseach on the life of Herman Hupfeld. It started because a piano player friend of mine when asked what else did he write, retorted that he never wrote anything else.
Hupfeld was not a prolifc song writer, but wrote some gems of the 1930s and 1940s.
Below is my draft of the bio relating to “As Time Goes By”.
One of the songs he wrote in the period has gone on to be one of the most performed songs of all time as recognized by ASCAP. Written for the show Everybody’s Welcome (1931) “As Time Goes By” was accidentally revived in eleven years later. Murray Burnett and Joan Allison in writing the play, “Everybody Comes To Ricks”, on which “Casablanca” (1942) is based, included the song in their script. Warner Brothers and Max Steiner, who wrote the music for “Casablanca”, intended to take the song out and replace it with one Steiner was going to write. When filming finished, Mr. Steiner was busy with other projects and by the time they got around to doing some thing about it, Ingrid Bergman had changed her hair in preparation for her next picture (and the scene could not be refilmed). Thus “As Time Goes By” stayed in the film and went on to become a number one song on “Your Hit Parade” for the longest period of any song as of that time.
In 1943 Herman recounted for The New Yorker magazine the early days of this now timeless melody “As Time Goes By”: He took it first to Beatrice Lillie, who told him it wasn’t just her sort of thing, but that she liked it so well she’d advance him hundred dollars on it. “Then the most farcical circumstances happened,” he recalled. “I happened to play it for Harold Arlen*, and he nearly fainted. He said, ‘It’s exactly what we need for Frances Williams — we’ve got to, got to, got have it!’ So I rushed back to Bea, and she was sweet as cream. She said, But darling of course take it back.’ So I returned the hundred and the song went into ‘Everbody’s Welcome’ and stopped the show every night. They hollered and screamed. They just simply hollered and screamed, and it stopped the show. “Everybody’s Welcome” lasted for 31 performances and but the Shubert Organization into bankruptcy in 1931.
* Harold Arlen wrote the music for Judy Garland’s “Over The Rainbow”.
“African Queen” was OK, it had content.
I’m with you on Val Kilmer. He was fantastic.
My Wifes favorite movie. Me...It’s ok. Gotta watch it every Christmas holiday(when did it become a holiday movie?)
For me, it’s probably The Godfather. Godfather 2 was pretty damn good too.
My personal favorite.
These days they’d have Maureen O’Hara spanking Wayne.
She could spank me anytime!
It was wonderful and so timely. I always thought this movie knocked out John Wayne for best actor award for Red River.
“…there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”
Some things never change as time goes by. ; )
“People around me sang out loud the soaring “Le Marseillaise ... ”
Possibly the world’s best anthem.
“…there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.”
“Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“ When it comes to women, you're a true democrat.”
“ Ugarte: You despise me, don't you?
Rick: If I gave you any thought I probably would.”
“ I don't mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.”
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