Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942)

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.
Play it once, Sam. For old times' sake.
Round up the usual suspects.
Here's looking at you, kid.

There is perhaps no film that is quoted more often in popular culture than the 1940s drama Casablanca. Beloved by audiences around the world since its release in 1942, Casablanca is widely considered today to be one of the greatest films of all time.

This was not always the case. Upon its initial release, Casablanca was just another romantic drama turned out by Hollywood in its heyday. It received generally good reviews, but no one expected it to become the icon it is today. This change in popularity cannot be contributed to one event or aspect of the movie; it simply continued to capture the hearts of more and more viewers as time went on. Murray Burnett, author of the play from which Casablanca was adapted, calls the story, “true yesterday, true today, true tomorrow.”

Casablanca stars Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the story is set during World War II and focuses on the moral struggles of cynical expatriate Rick Blaine (Bogart), who runs a nightclub in the Moroccan city of Casablanca. At that time, Casablanca was a colony controlled by Vichy France (the French government after France was defeated by Nazi Germany in 1940), and Rick’s Café has become a hotspot for refugees looking for illegal letters of transit to escape to America.

One day an unexpected visitor from Rick’s past re-enters his life, and he is forced to make a decision between “love and virtue.” Rick must choose between being with the woman he loves (Bergman as Ilsa Lund) and assisting her and her husband (Henreid as Victor Laszlo), who is a Czech Resistance leader escaped from a Nazi-controlled concentration camp, out of Casablanca. Ilsa had deserted Rick earlier in the war when the Nazis took over Paris, but seeing him in Casablanca is all it takes for their romance to be sparked once again.

The role of Rick Blaine was a turning point in Bogart’s career. Although by this time he was well-known in Hollywood thanks to roles in films like High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca gave Bogart a chance to break out of his gangster typecast and open the doors to the more romantic roles he would become known for in his later years. Similarly, Casablanca was Bergman’s first big hit after her American debut in the 1939 film Intermezzo.

The supporting characters in Casablanca are just as poignant as the leads - Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault, Conrad Veidt as Major Heinrich Strasser, Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari, Peter Lorre as Signor Ugarte, and of course Dooley Wilson as Sam are equally as memorable in their respective roles as Bogart and Bergman are as conflicted lovers Rick and Ilsa.

Casablanca is a tour of humor and heartache, a patriotic film that continues to capture the hearts of its viewers, even seventy years after its initial release. Its iconic nature has awarded it a devoted fan base of viewers who continue to enjoy the tale of Rick and Ilsa’s fated romance – The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, has screened the film during the week of Harvard University’s final exams since 1957, and the film has spawned numerous parodies, including 2001’s Out Cold and Woody Allen’s 1972 hit Play it Again, Sam.

Casablanca was nominated for eight and won three Academy Awards in 1943, ranked number two on the American Film institute’s list of the 100 best American movies (second only to Citizen Kane), and in 2006, the Writers Guild of America named its screenplay number one in its list of the 101 greatest screenplays of all time. These accolades are nothing, however, in comparison to the place Casablanca has earned in the hearts of millions of fans, who return again and again to experience the romance and suspense, and to hear that famous closing line : Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Maddie Butler
Film Club

Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954)

How do we account for the continued popularity of Audrey Hepburn? Ask your parents or grandparents about her and they’ll mention Roman Holiday, Funny Face, My Fair Lady, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and almost no one has anything critical to say about her. She’s beautiful. She’s fabulous. She’s Audrey.

Is it too simple just to say that she was a movie star, in that old time way that movie stars used to be larger than life, more glamorous than any star seems to achieve these days, and so she sticks in our collective consciousness? As do Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor, Charlton Heston.

What it boils down to for Heburn is class. Hepburn had class – style, couture, grace, savoir faire. Watch her in Sabrina. Even when she’s playing the chauffeur’s daughter, before she’s gone to Europe and hobnobbed with culture, she has that class. The only thing different about her when she comes back is she has fashion – gorgeous dresses designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head.

(You know Edith Head. She’s the fashion designer Brad Bird caricatured as Edna Mode or “E” in The Incredibles, the designer of their costumes. The real Head, a legend, designed costumes for over 400 movies, from 1927 until 1980. We don’t know if any of them had capes.)

We don’t really need to belabor the point here. To watch Hepburn in Sabrina is to see, to understand star power, to know what was so compelling about her. The other stars in the film – and they were big (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) – seem to pale when she’s around.

Perhaps a more interesting line of inquisition is why so few Hollywood actors today can achieve this? Certainly part of it is the studio system which no longer exists. The studios controlled, rigidly, the public personae of their stars, and they were able to amplify and shape them into the gods and goddesses we remember. Today things are different; the central publicity machines are missing and the Internet is here, where anyone with a digital camera can catch you nude, overweight, and having a bad hair day on a beach, then post the pictures on their blog for everyone to see. We live in an age in which the sheer volume of personal, and often unflattering data, destroys any possibility of one’s mythologization.

Russell Crowe. Didn’t he hit some guy with a telephone? Julia Roberts is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. Fans are equally aware of her movies and her tempestuous love life.

Myth cannot exist in a world of trivial minutiae that diminishes star status. This is true not only of movie stars but presidents (a 2005 book about Abraham Lincoln claimed he might have been homosexual – the claim is disputed by most historians – and recent revelations about John F. Kennedy’s indiscretions in the White House have done a bit to tarnish his Camelot image), civil rights leaders (historians have argued that some of Martin Luther King’s academic papers and speeches contained plagiarism), and sports heroes (steroids, anyone?).

If anything, watching Audrey Hepburn now allows us to return to a time when we were allowed to have movie stars, and they could exist in a bubble unpunctured by too much information. Could Audrey Hepburn, the glamorous, the embodiment of class, exist as a star today? We think not. That’s why we can revel in and honor her as the star of movies like Sabrina.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep (1946)

One of the most intriguing aspects of film noir is its use of a strong narrator. Voice-overs and first-person, or restricted, narration are used with both style and consistency in the genre, so much so that we tend to associate those characteristics with film noir and to describe other movies that use the technique as “noirist.” (There is even one film, Lady in the Lake, filmed entirely from the main character’s point of view; that is, all the camera shots are all restricted to what he sees, as if the camera were his head, and the only time you see the character himself is when he’s looking in a mirror.)

Let’s hit the quote machine: “What is significant about The Big Sleep in terms of narration is that is strictly adheres to restricted narration – that is, the camera is always tied to Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart’s character), so the spectator finds out what happens in the narrative when Marlowe does. For example, while waiting outside Geiger’s house, Marlowe sees a car pull up outside. He hides in his car so as not to be seen. Interestingly, the camera remains outside the car and shows a figure get of the other car and enter Geiger’s house. Yet, the figure remains in shadow. So, even though the camera does not directly imitate Marlowe’s point of view as he hides in the car, it does not privilege the spectator either” (Buckland, Film Studies, 43-44).

So what does this limited perspective do for our understanding of this film and of the film noir genre? Well, for The Big Sleep, we get a simple connection. Based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep is a detective story, a genre that likes to unravel mysteries one clue at a time. Limiting our experience to what Marlowe learns as he learns it both maintains the suspense and allows us to enjoy the step-by-step solving of an intricate puzzle.

Beyond this, we may conclude that film noir employs this technique consistently because it tends to depict an urban world in which a single character struggles (usually unsuccessfully) against the forces of corruption, temptation, and chaos. A first-person narration enhances this focus. In addition, film noir frequently delves into the psychological effects or torment of its characters, and this is more cathartic for the audience if we are closer to the character.

This is not to say that film noir avoids third-person or omniscient narration. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, regarded as the final film noir of its period, employs third-person very effectively, from its opening scene where we watch someone put a bomb in the rear of a car, then follow the car as it works its way slowly through a Mexican border town, then shift to follow the two protagonists as they take an evening stroll. The third-person here allows us to meet characters (exposition) and regard the situation (with its rampant hypocrisy and corruption) objectively and a kind of distanced horror.

But The Big Sleep loves its protagonists. And with Bogart we’re unlikely to get a character who suffers because of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. He may be cynical (world-wise). He may be imperfect (human). He may struggle with a world going to hell. But Bogart usually, as you’ll see here, remains above the morass. The film’s restricted narration makes us his sidekick. It’s a great place to be.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser