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:

 

The 20 Best Films of all Time chosen by me - Part 2

It's been difficult to limit myself to just five films, but this is a list which I could happily watch on a regular basis:

1. Duck Soup - The Marx Brothers
While growing up I'd seen A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, A Night in Casablanca and The Big Store on TV as a regular bass as my father was a great fan.  But when I read up about the Marx Brothers saw that there were several early films that never seemed to make it to TV.  And then one wet Sunday afternoon BBC2 screened Duck Soup and I was hooked.

2. Notting Hill

I'd always regarded Four Weddings and a Funeral as a piece of cinema verite as  saw it at the time that most of my college contemporaries were getting married, and so far only one has died.  However Notting Hill has a more complex plot, a wonderful role for a beautiful Julia Roberts, and Elvis Costello singing She over the credits.  Need I say more?

 

 

3. Manhattan
It's a bit of a cliche to choose Manhattan as it regularly appears on Best Of Lists, but it is pretty good and I do like Rhapsody in Blue...  I've seen all the films that Woody Allen directed in the 10 years after Annie Hall and many of those from the later period, although only his recent Midnight in Paris comes close to his legendary brilliance.

4. Kind Hearts and Coronets
I had to choose an Ealing comedy and to me this is by far the best.  Apart from the virtuoso series of character parts from Alec Guinness the plot is razor sharp with a brilliant twist at the end.

 

 

 

5. Best in Show

This comes from the same team that produced This is Spinal Tap and is set in the world of competitive dog shows.  Against my better judgement I once went to Crufts to accompany my wife, who is a confirmed dog-aholic and it confirmed all my worst nightmares.  However Best in Show is a very funny satire - in the form of a dog-umentary.



Midnight in Paris

These are my notes for this week's screening:

Midnight in Paris

USA 2011                    100 minutes

Director:                      Woody Allen

Starring:                        Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Tom Hiddleston

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for four Oscars including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
• Another 39 nominations, including a BAFTA nomination for Best Original Screenplay and 11 wins, including a Golden Globe for Best Original Screenplay.

“This is Woody Allen's 41st film. He writes his films himself, and directs them with wit and grace. I consider him a treasure of the cinema. Some people take him for granted, although Midnight in Paris reportedly charmed even the jaded veterans of the Cannes press screenings. There is nothing to dislike about it. Either you connect with it or not. I'm wearying of movies that are for "everybody" — which means, nobody in particular.  Midnight in Paris is for me, in particular, and that's just fine with moi.”

Roger Ebert

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a disillusioned Hollywood scriptwriter who while visiting Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and future parents-in-law finds that the city has revived his desire to become a serious novelist.  While walking through the city late one night Gil is picked up by a mysterious antique Peugeot that takes him back in time to the 1920s where he meets Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter. In subsequent trips to the past he also travels back to the 1892, where he meets Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas.  Gil rejects an offer from a girl he meets to stay in the past but his trips back in time help him resolve what to do with his life in the present.   

There are many modern films with a time travel theme with the Back to the Future trilogy and Groundhog Day being the most successful.  In Allen’s own, extensive catalogue, there are certain similarities to The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) in which an actor steps out of a film and falls in love with a girl in the audience.  However Philip French also suggests that Allen has been influenced by Victor Sjoestroem’s silent film The Phantom Carriage (1921), the favourite film of his idol Ingmar Bergman, in which a ghostly coach travels round town at midnight picking up the dead. 

Since 2000 Woody Allen has worked extensively in Europe with European casts where his films have included Match Point (2005) and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010), both of which were filmed in the UK and the award-winning Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) which was filmed in Spain.

Here's the trailer: