Once Again On The - 75th Anniversary Of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” -
By Bart Webber (October 2017)
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. “Hot date” in those days for those not around then or who have forgotten (shame on you) in the female department being a gal who wore short dresses (mini-skirts being a heavy fashion sea-change brought over I think by the English rock invasion which in any case replaced the severe stiff collared shirt and long flouncy, I guess that is the right word, skirt of earlier high school times) and long hair. Long hair also something of a sea-change brought not from over the ocean deeps but locally by imitation of folk-singing icon Joan Baez among the folk set which I was hung up on. (Many a young woman with less than candid straight hair had told me that she spent not a few hours “ironing” her hair to perdition to get that cool “look”)
More important than the skirt-hair combo attached to the folk scene aficionado-hood a date who did not mind going on a cheap date (hell the theater admission was about a dollar maybe two so there was something left over for the obligatory popcorn) when I told her what film we would be seeing. (That cheap movie date acceptance usually having already having been charted by a first or second date Harvard Square coffeehouse date where for the price of two long sipped cups of coffee and a shared pastry you could sit and talk to while away the night, sometimes depending on the night accompanied by some rising folk singer working out his or her performance kinks playing for the “basket” passed through the audience.)
Now I am talking about Casablanca but when the Brattle did a retro usually there were twelve to twenty films in the repertoire almost all of which I would have either seen in my youth with my old friend Sam Lowell, who later became a film critic for a bunch of alternative newspapers like back in the day like The Rolling Stone, or by myself on Saturday afternoon double feature days at the Strand Theater in North Adamsville where we grew up. The young woman in this Casablanca scenarios and maybe others as well somehow had asked her mother who had been there on the first run about the film and so was intrigued about this hot on-screen romance during wartime between Rick and Ilsa. I am sure the mother young and in love with some departed soldier boy ready to go to Europe or the Pacific to do battle against that age’s night-takers filled her head with all the classic expressions and all the intimate moments when the two wartime star-crossed lovers had to go their separate ways reflecting just a bit her own concerns. Maybe she couldn’t explain the twenty some years after tear in her eye when reciting the plotline to that young daughter but she must have reflected on that line “We’ll always have Paris” dovetailing with her own broody thoughts back then.
Here’s what was really nice about that particular date and I may have owed it all to the film (and a mother’s reflections too not recognized at the time. 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.” (Of course going to a local coffeehouse for coffee and pastry was out of the question once the gold bars had been spent on the movie and that mandatory popcorn.) The Hayes in those days not only a waystation for winos, the homeless and friendless and con artists but a place where rising folk-singers and their hangers-on hung out on the cheap.
Naturally that Hayes-Bickford coffee take in led to a play by play recording of her and my takes on the film. Maybe naturally as well from a viewing perspective the conversation turned into a guy-gal thing me thinking about the resistance action parts and she with the romance lingering fragrance. I remember I concentrated on Rick Blaine’s moving off dead-center “a curse on both your houses” I ain’t doing nothing for nobody approach at the beginning of the film to his giving up his life’s love for the cause of fighting the night-takers one more time.
The key to me was that Rick was not just some grumbling ex pat stuck in Casablanca trying to get over a broken love affair but that he had a past, a good past, as we find out when he is introduced to the Germans come to check on the Vichy French and they seem to know all about his past (including the color of his eyes). Rick had smuggled guns to the Ethiopians during the Italian invasion and fought for the Loyalist side in Spain so he had no love lost for the German night-takers when they showed up in Casablanca to keep that eye on their Vichy French collaborators. Moreover even as an American in Paris where he had met and fallen in love with Ilsa when the Germans were ready to come marching into Paris it was no accident that he (and he assumed love Ilsa) had to get out of Paris quickly before they had a chance to pick him up. So his later actions, his so-called “gesture for love” giving those damn letters of transport away gratis made more sense.
Of course that gal, that Mary Beth to finally give her a name, came back at me on that “gesture of love” business which she felt I had expressed kind of sarcastically when she pointed out that Rick’s new found interest in life, in being more than a “saloon-keeper,” a “gin-joint operator” and a drunk and womanizer all changed when spring flower Ilsa showed up at his doors. Mary Beth honed in on the scene where after first being re-introduced to Ilsa and introduced to the legendary Lazlo and after castigating his longtime employee Sam for playing the sentiment “their” song he gets good and drunk and starts thinking about those Paris days. From that point on he comes alive, starts to think about him and Ilsa high-tailing it. When that came to nothing, when he saw that the troubles of three people in a big old world turning in on itself he made the fateful gesture-and committed to the struggle. So just as naturally as going to the Hayes-Bickford to chat about the film we agreed to disagree and leave it at that.
But 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 that “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 blood-stained letters of transit provided by 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.
As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of that premier of that film 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 and even know it all Sam Lowell who knows a lot about all the characters particularly the fate of Paul Henreid l 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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