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.
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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