While certainly no fan of old movies for the sake of old movies -- and a complete dunce in the pink category of Trivial Pursuit -- I noticed that Casablanca is not going away. Just like Sergeant Pepper has been outdone at its own game countless times yet still tops many an greatest album chart, Casablanca is still number one, just beating that young upstart Orson Welles and his biopic.
For example, just the other day, a propos of nothing, CNN published this feature. Maybe the news media is, again, preparing us for sacrifice ahead.
I figured 66 years isn't too late to see the dang thing and maybe review it. Plus meddlers occasionally get to these old movies and modify them. So an occasional new review might serve an important purpose.
I could only name one of the famous lines from Casablanca -- the one that is actually never said ("play it again, Sam"). Now I can do four or five. I'm going to avoid "Here's looking at you, kid" -- boy how I am going to avoid that one -- but there are couple good ones, and some obscure lines that might come in handy for me, like "Get away from me, you crazy Russian".
The interesting thing is that Casablanca's main theme does in fact tie indirectly into my own family issues. My wife works for an Estonian voluntary defence organization. She's a civilian, but we've often discussed how, if push came to shove, I might potentially take Morgan to the States while she stays behind.
Neither I nor my wife is into sentimental romance -- the province of the young and foolish. So Bogart is a perfect leading man. He phones it in like a champ, of course, relying on not much more than his own hardboiled persona. The rear projection flashback scenes of gay Paris with Bogart evoking carefree youth with a green-gilled smile in the foreground are mercifully brief, for us as well as Humphrey.
Casablanca will never be remade (not until WWIII and then under a different city's name) because of its sacred status but if it were, the big difference, I reflected, is Sam -- Sam would definitely have a role in the airport climax. Strasser would not be shot; Westerns-style, in the briefest of duels, but would manage to get away and try to stop the plane. Laszlo and Ilse move at such a stately pace toward the aircraft that they beg for one last obstacle.
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Whilst on the topic of famous endings of great films, Max recalls the ending of 'The Third Man,' the long shot of Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) walking toward the camera and Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). She reaches Martins and keeps going without a glance.
During the shooting, the final scene was hotly disputed by Graham Greene, who wanted the happy ending of the novella, and David Selznick and Sir Carol Reed, who stubbornly refused to end the film on what they felt was an artificially happy note.
Today, almost everyone concedes that Reed and Selznick were right. But as with that slow walk to the plane at the end of Casablanca, every time I see Holly/Jos.Cotten standing there amid the falling leaves, I rather expect Anna/Valli to stop and speak to him.
More trivia from Max, who has a trivial mind...
The exquisitely beautiful Alida Valli (billed in her Hollywood films as simply 'Valli')who played Anna Schmidt in 'The Third Man' was born in 1921 in Pola, Istria, Italy [now Pula, Istria, Croatia] of mixed Austrian-Italian-German parentage and christened Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger, Baroness of Marckenstein and Frauenberg of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
None of her subsequent films achieved the success of 'The Third Man.'
She died in Rome in 2006.
I was 'shocked, SHOCKED' to read somewhere that in 1941, false studio publicity had the lead in Casablanca going to... Ronald Reagan. In fact, Reagan was never in the running, and the story was probably planted by a press agent to keep his name in the news.
Now... WHAT IF Ronnie had gotten Bogart's role? Would history have been altered? Would 'Casablanca' still have become a classic? Would Bogie have become president?
;-)
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