Once Again On The - 75th Anniversary (2017) Of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” -
By Bart Webber
I have spent much ink this year starting almost at the beginning of the year writing about the classic black and white film Casablanca a staple at every retro-film locale including the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I first saw it with a “hot date” back in the late 1960s. A date who did not mind going on a cheap date (hell the admission was about a dollar maybe two) when I told her what we would be seeing. (Somehow she had asked her mother about the film and so was intrigued about this hot on-screen romance during wartime between Rick and Ilsa.) That movie coupled with a quick after film stop at equally cheap Harvard Square Hayes Bickford for coffee (always an iffy proposition depending on when the stuff was brewed also iffy) and some kind of pastry that had been sitting on the stainless steel dessert shelves for who knows how long got me away without having to call “dutch treat.” Got me as well another six months of very nice dates so my memories of that gorgeous film with the six million quotable and unforgettable lines from “play it again, Sam” (Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa request to Humphrey Bogart Rick’s main entertainment provider Dooley Wilson to play the sentimental As Time Goes By) to “We will always have Paris” (when Rick responds to Ilsa’s bewilderment that he is letting her take that last plane to Lisbon with those wicked letters of transit provided him to her husband Czech liberation leader Victor Laszlo so he can continue to do his work against the night-takers running the world in those days) are still pristine.
I am not the only one who is crazy for this movie since I am enclosing a link to an interview done by Terry Gross on her Fresh Air show on NPR with film historian Noah Isenberg on the making of the classic Hollywood film in his new book, We'll Always Have Casablanca. " Needless to say when I get my greedy little hands on that item I will be reviewing it in this space. This guy has me beaten six ways to Sunday with what he knows about that film. Kudos.
http://www.npr.org/2017/10/11/557101633/75-years-later-a-look-at-the-life-legend-and-afterlife-of-casablanca
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