Casablanca...

We are about to celebrate our 150th screening.  No one is quite sure when it actually is as we have not kept records of a few ad hoc events, so by unanimous decision it will be this week.

In honour of this magnificent occasion there is only one choice: Casablanca...

So we have booked a jazz bad, will provide a three course Moroccan buffet and our house is full of cases of prosecco which I will deliver to the Village Hall on Saturday.

And we will of course be screening a film.  I had great fun scouring the internet for articles, and found a great quote by Roger Ebert.  I also found the Umberto Eco quote in an article, but I have the book of essays from which it comes on my shelf.

Here are my notes:

Casablanca

USA 1942                    102 minutes

Director:                      Michael Curtiz

Starring:                        Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson

Awards and Nominations

• Won three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay)
• Nominated for five more Oscars including Best Actor (Bogart lost out to Paul Lukas for Watch on the Rhine) and Best Supporting Actor (Claude Rains lost out to Charles Coburn for The More The Merrier)
• Ingrid Bergman was nominated as Best Actress for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls

"Casablanca is The Movie. There are greater movies.  More profound movies.  Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance.  There are other titles we would put above it on our lists of the best films of all time.  But when it comes right down to the movies we treasure the most, when we are - let us imagine - confiding the secrets of our heart to someone we think we may be able to trust, the conversation sooner or later comes around to the same seven words:

"I really love Casablanca."

"I do too." "

Roger Ebert

The starting point for Casablanca was a script for an unperformed play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s: the inspiration for the play had been a visit that the writers made to a night club in the south of France where a black pianist played to entertain the French, Nazis and refugees although they set the play in Casablanca.  The official credits for the screenplay are for the Epstein brothers and Howard Koch, with uncredited contributions and rewrites from Casey Robinson as well as input from Michael Curtiz: the final result was a script where no one could remember who had written what.  Umberto Eco has highlighted this complex genealogy as one of the great strengths of the film:

“Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology.  Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control.  And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making.  For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it.

...When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths.  Two clichés make us laugh.  A hundred clichés move us.  For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.”

 By 1955 Casablanca had earned $6.8 million, making it the third most successful of Warners wartime films, by 1977 it had become the most frequently broadcast film on US television, and in 1989 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". 

Many later films have used elements of Casablanca: Bogart, Rains, Greenstreet and Lorre all appeared in Curtiz’s Passage to Marseille (1944), and To Have and Have Not (1944), with Bogart in it the lead, has many similarities to Casablanca.  In addition to Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam (1972) in which Casablanca played a significant part, the film has also inspired many parodies, including the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (1946) Neil Simon’s The Cheap Detective (1978), and a Looney Tunes cartoon version called Carrot Blanca (1995) in which Bugs Bunny plays the Bogart role.  Even the script has been a source of inspiration for artists: Michael Singer chose The Usual Suspects for his unwritten script as he thought it would make a good title, and David Thomson used the same phrase as the epigraph for his novel Suspects whose characters (among many from films of this period) include Ilsa, Rick and Captain Renault.

Everybody Comes to Rick’s was finally staged in London in 1992, when it ran for six weeks.

In case you haven't seen it, here's the trailer:

 

Are these the best shots in cinema?

I like the idea of someone collecting the best shots in cinema and have just followed Geoff Todd on Twitter:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/10807513/Are-these-the-15-best-shots-in-cinema.html

I have David Thomson's Moments That Made the Movies on my shelf and I dip into it from time - it's that kind of book.

His slection of films is eclectic, although it does include the usual suspects.  But what makes it intersting is the choice of image to represent each film.  Some of them are truly unexpected.  It's an excellent book

Christmas Books: a Letter to Santa

This was on my Christmas list for last year:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/12/big-screen-movies-david-thomson-review

Clearly I had been good, as my copy duly arrived and it was jut as good as John Banville's review had suggested.

This year I've dropped some none-too-subtle hints for David Thomson's most recent book, this time reviewed by the brilliant Philip French:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/18/moments-movies-david-thomson-review

I will keep all my fingers crossed for the next few weeks...

The 20 Best Films of all Time chosen by me - Part 3

And now we move on to thrillers.  Once again this is my own selection, and the only criterion is that I have to have seen any film I nominate.

1. The Lady Vanishes
I read some time last year that you could not consider yourself a serious film fan unless you had seen The Lady Vanishes.  I'd read about it many times but had never seen it - at least no consciously.  Fortunately a quick internet order remedied the deficiency: I really enjoyed it and it has an amazing vitality that belies its 1938 release date.

2. The Long Good Friday
I'd been a fan of Helen Mirren ever since O Lucky Man - I'd even watched her on Jackanory reading a story in an amazingly low cut Jacobethen dress - but this was the first time I'd seen her in a role that did justice to her talent.  Bob Hoskins is pretty good too (understatement) and the whole film really caught the zeitgeist.

3. Casablanca
I'm not sure if this is a thriller or a lovely story, but who cares.  It's a film I could see forever, and it was the film that my wife and I went to on our first date: a double bill with Play It Again Sam. We'll always have Casablanca.

4. Fargo
In our film society we try t show the best of releases, but several years ago we made an exception for Fargo - still one of the best films in a very strong field from the Coen brothers.  since I'd first seen it I'd actually visited Minnesota several times for work and recognised the accent, but fortunately all my trips were in the Spring or the Autumn.  And now I even have my own wood chipper.

5. Chinatown
I first saw this in my first year at university when I suddenly became aware of the big world of films that opened up around me. It's a brilliant homage to Hollywood of the 1940s as well as a key film of the 1970s - and several of the characters play key roles in David Thomson's brilliantly unsettling novel Suspects.

Fargo

Apparently it is mandatory for every film society to show Fargo.  We fulfilled this obligation several years ago, and when I was researching for my notes I found the wonderful extract from a piece by David Thomson which I was able to quote in full:

 

Fargo

USA 1996       (98 minutes)

Director:          Joel Cohen

Starring:          Frances McDormand, William H. Macy and Steve Buscemi

 Awards and Nominations

Won                Oscar for Best Original Screenplay

                        Oscar for Leading Actress (Frances McDormand)

Nominated for five further Oscars

Won                BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay

Won                Best Director (Joel Coen)

Nominated for a further five baftas

Won                Best Director (Joel Coen) at Cannes Film Festival

Nominated for Golden Palm

An overall total of 49 wins and 19 nominations

In Minnesota a small-time business man with severe financial problems hires two inept hoodlums to kidnap his wife in an attempt to obtain ransom from his father-in-law.  However the plot goes murderously wrong and a heavily-pregnant sheriff arrives from Minneapolis to solve the string of unexpected deaths in her jurisdiction.

The film claims to be based on a true story, but in his introduction to the published screenplay Ethan Coen undermines this:

“The story that follows is about Minnesota.  It evokes the abstract landscape of our childhood – a bleak, windswept tundra, resembling Siberia except for its Ford dealerships and Hardee’s restaurants.  It aims to be homey and exotic, and pretends to be true.”

Subsequently it emerged that the Coens’ inspiration was a 1986 murder in Connecticut where a husband used a wood chipper to dispose of his wife’s body – the Coens moved the location to Minnesota because they had been born and brought up on the outskirts of Minneapolis. 
 
The film was launched to universal acclaim and secured many awards.  It has secured its place in cinema history and recently David Thompson included it as one of only three films released in 1996 in his book “Have You Seen?” A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films where he summarised its appeal as follows:

“Fargo is just 97 minutes long, compact and efficient (cost $7 million; earnings $24.5 million), a sort of “the gang’s all here” of American independent film, and a quiet knockout.  When the snow is that thick, you won’t hear a body or a Douglas fir fall, just the hush being underlined.  But the tonal range of the film is what is leaving puffs of breath in the air.  From one moment to the next this film is gruesome, bloody and “Oh no!” as well as so funny you wish those starchy voices would stop talking for a second.”

In a career of nearly 25 years the Coen brothers have produced a series of brilliant films that have been successful with both festival and multiplex audiences.  Fargo is arguably their greatest film and until No Country For Old Men (2007) it was their most successful in terms of nominations and awards.

 

In case you need any more encouragement, here's the trailer:

 

 

Weird Stuff

One of the joys of my role in the Film club is that I have a valid excuse to search out reviews and other information on the films that we are screening so that I can produce the notes for our members.

Usually this involves a quick trawl through the archives of Philip French and Peter Bradshaw with the odd vist to Wikipedia and IMDB for a killer quote or a list of awards and nominations. However Cinema Paradiso presented me with a challenge as it appeared long before online reviews, although of course it featured regularly in the usual "best of" lists. However conicidentally I had picked up my copy of Have You Seen?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films by David Thomson, which is brilliant for late-night browsing, although I am still only on the letter C. I hadn't looked at it for a while, but after opening the at my bookmark I turned the page to find his article on Cinema Paradiso. Spooky!