Dear DR Laura II:
If you haven’t seen Casablanca, then the odds are that a lot of your friends haven’t seen it, either. What I think you should do is invite a group of them over and watch it together! Make a party of it, or at least a “girl’s night in” or something. And if you have trouble convincing some of them to come, here’s Uncle Woody’s List of Reasons to Watch Casablanca:
Bogart – Was never better than in this film. It perfectly captures his persona, and everything else he did, both before and after, can be seen in relation to this central performance. He’s tough, but he’s also amazingly romantic. Yes, you and the crew are going to want to see African Queen as a follow-up, but this one really should come first.
Ingrid Bergman – In what may well be the persona role of her career. She was never lovelier than she is in this film, to the point of being luminescent. But that’s only part of what she brings to the film. She isn’t just “the woman” in the picture. She makes you understand how Bogart’s Rick could fall so deeply in love with her. Suggested follow-up would be Hitchcock’s Notorious, opposite Cary Grant.
The Other Players – as in Paul Heinreid, Claude Raines, Conrad Veidt, Sidney Greenstreet, and most particularly Peter Lorre (before he proved what an adept comic he could be in the next follow-up film, Arsenic and Old Lace, again with Grant and with Boris Karloff spoofing himself.
Paul Dooley – The most important supporting role of them all, singing “As Time Goes By.” But he does more than sing and play the piano, he plays the one fellow who is Bogart’s true friend, willing to tell him things that are true. Given race relations when the film was made, that was something of a statement to make, even if it wasn’t obvious at the time. (In fact, that it wasn’t obvious was probably part of how it became part of the film!)
Michael Curtiz – The director. Talk about a career! Just a quick glance over the films he made gives us Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Life with Father, White Christmas…in a word, wow! He was a master working in color (add Robin Hood to that list of follow-ups), but what he could do with black and white was simply amazing. He could make you want to stay in Kansas! This man knew how to make movies!
The Writing – Working from a not-too-good play by Murray Bennett and Joan Alison, the twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch came up with a classic, full of drama and amazing dialogue. No one could ever speak like this in real life! But we do, because we quote them so often.
The Studio System Gets it Right – Which, considering how films were being cranked out at the time, and how this was not conceived as one of the big pics when they started making it, is remarkable. It could have been a throwaway clunker, forever forgotten, but instead all the pieces fit together to make for one of the classic touchstones of our culture.
That should be enough. Like I say, get your friends together for an evening at the movies. Pair this one with African Queen, get together on another night for back-to-back Notorious and Arsenic and Old Lace. And get back to us for other pairings. The crew around here is bound to have tons of suggestions.
