Casablanca
Michael Curtiz
“You’ve taken leave of your senses.” “I have sit over there.”
Can’t believe I somehow avoided this film until now. Interesting characters. Love story is pretty good if you let it be. “Affected,” “melodramatic,” “corny,” “great.” This is going to seem like arrested criticism (see Piaget), but I think it’s so funny how everyone goes around with secret code talk and such. I mean, is there anyone in the bar who isn’t a spy? Or running some sort of, I don’t know, some sort of racket? Why don’t they all just stop playing these silly games? And love.
The relationship between Indiana and Marion in Raiders had to have based on this film. The far away bar. The random encounter so many years later. Wow. Yeah. I think Lucas “wrote” Raiders? Just like he “wrote” Star Wars? Or maybe I’m mistaken…Han Solo? Bogart? Hello?
Touch of Evil is a better film, but Casablanca has its own magic to be sure. It’s got “strong performances by Bogart and Bergman,” “snappy dialogue,” “horrible dialogue,” “wonderful dialogue,” “pure magic.”
One of the 12 banned episodes called All This and Rabbit Stew features a black hunter who has over-sized lips and shuffles his feet. Though the cartoon would cause much offence today, when it was made in 1941 such images were commonplace. The 11 other banned cartoons, created between 1941 and 1960, contain images that are offensive to many other racial groups. After much debate, the network now plans to make a documentary featuring the banned clips but with a historian putting them into will put them in context.