Short answer: pretty much.
So, I finally got around to watching Casablanca the other day. For a while, when I was younger, after 1994 and seeing Pulp Fiction, I got on a kick to seek out the old "classics" and give them a look. It makes sense to me that it was Tarantino's non-linear Travolta vehicle that got me interested in the history of the form, and five years later, in 1999, a different movie got me interested in a different subject (The Matrix and philosophy).
In between '94 and '97, I watched On the Waterfront, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, both Godfathers, Citizen Kane and Bullit, and those are ones I can remember. I've watched them all since, and they remain as good as my memory told me they were back then. In fact, Kane, ...Waterfront, and Chinatown are on my Top 5 All-Time Favorite list (good luck guessing the other two). Norm and I even went to Tower Theater in '96 and saw Taxi Driver for the twentieth anniversary showing.
Later I discovered Kurosawa and Melville, Cool Hand Luke and Bonnie and Clyde and The Long Goodbye.
For some reason neither Casablanca, nor Gone with the Wind were ever on my must-see list. I mean, I went out of my way to find the Peter Lorre German-language M (by Fritz Lang), as well as the older Fritz Lang classic, Metropolis, and have even watched Sherlock Jr, a classic early surrealistic/sci-fi film shot around Culver City (thanks Dan for making that possible, with the Buster Keaton DVD set).
But I was reading something about Casablanca after having a talk with Uncle Dan about it and older films versus newer films, about the demands that older films put on their audience. I went and found a DVD copy on Amazon for less than the shipping cost, and snatched it up.
During that period of the Hollywood system the studios were making 50 movies a year, basically a movie a week. A freaking movie a week. Some day job, right? Casablanca was just supposed to be one of the others, one of the fifty. Based on an unproduced play, the actors were coming in everyday to the studio and getting that day's pages of the script. On top of it, the female lead, Ingrid Bergman, a young and beautiful Swede, didn't know which of the two leading men she was supposed to be in love with, and was more interested in her next role, phoning everyday after the filming to get updates on the negotiations for that role's contract.
Casablanca has probably the most international cast of any film, and the chaos and tension on the set (Paul Henreid, the other male lead (not Bogey) thought Bogey was a hack, and the script left him very little with which to shine) led to the palatable tension and sense of chaos that permeates the movie. Many of the actors are actual refugees from Nazi occupied territory. This movie was filmed and released in 1942. It was set, though, in 1941, before the Pearl Harbor attack, to keep Bogart's Rick mostly believable.
A film about escape, and love, and sacrifice, it hits home still. It may be dated, but it's timeless in its sense of honesty.
The dueling anthem scene? One of the most powerful things put to film (and then to video disc).
I thought it was good, and filmed well, with the smoke and shadows and kinetic camera movements--not quite Kane with the camera, but compared to any other '40s era movie, it's quite dynamic. The only real complaint I would make is that it's overscored. The score is nice, classic even, but it never goes away.
Afterwards, I was thinking about the reluctant hero archetype, and the two most famous reluctant heroes in American cinema are Bogart's Rick Blaine from Casablanca, and Han Solo.
They're both wise-cracking, self-interested rogues, dashing men who are in control--mostly--of their own fates, or at least believe they're in some sort of control, and in the end, do the right thing.
So, long answer, both Blaine and Solo are the same archetype.
Pretty good movie. Probably has earned the reputation, and shouldn't disappoint.
No comments:
Post a Comment