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It is another Film Spotting Archive drop, and with Valentine's Day just upon us here, Josh, we thought, why not check out some of the most romantic films that we've talked about in the Film Spotting Archive. Fair number of good ones to talk about, but then producer Sam had a good idea, put a little twist on it. What about the ones that have all been Best Picture winners leading up to the Oscars? So we thought, okay, let's go back. Let's go back, maybe to the most romantic
of them all. Casablanca.
Not a bad choice Casablanca. This is from March twenty seventeen. I missed out on this review, Adam. It was you, Michael Phillips, film prof Catherine Fusco.
So he got academic on you.
Yeah, just kind of making making me feel left out. Casablanca also in my mind though, because we are on this Friday show going to be nominating our candidates for the Film Spotting Pantheon for twenty twenty six, and Casablanca was in the.
Mix for me.
We'll see, we'll see if it made it. Listeners will find out when they listened to the show if it was one of those that I put in the mix. But definitely deserves consideration for the Pantheon, and obviously for this twenty seventeen review as well.
And not to make everyone's brain short circuit, but if it did make your list, Josh, they'd have to listen to find out whether or not it was a sacred cow title because obviously it got a sacred cow discussion, or whether it was a wild card because you didn't talk about it with me and the whole exactly this Pantheon project exactly, we talk about the movies together. So Casablanca is a really tricky one.
I may have found a loophole. We'll have to wait until Friday to see. But for now, for now, from March twenty seventeen, here is that review of Casablanca.
Well, you are asking about Rick, and.
Here he is.
Mademoiselle Mary present Illo reck, Oh you've already met.
Rick pant Brazil.
Well, then perhaps you won't serve christ Lasla. How do you do? How do you do? When he has a great deal about Ricky and Casablanca, not about Victor Lazlow everywhere.
So anticipating the show we're going to do right now, Adam, about Casablanca and whether or not it's still the movie that it used to be for a lot of people.
Maybe still is for an awful lot of it.
Last week, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies gathered in Chicago for its annual conference. And that is one hell of a lot of movie geeks in one town at one time. Let me tell you, hundreds of scholars, academics, specialists of all kinds. They gather, They give talks every imaginable subject, and I caught a couple of them last week. One of them was called Complex Figures in Classic Hollywood, and it featured a film and literature professor from the
University of Nevada Reno named Katherine Fusco. Well, Fusco gives this great twenty minute talk on Shirley Temple's profoundly disturbing early movie career in what we're known as baby burlesques. These sort of precursors to Bugsy Malone, right, and this creepy and very kind of like bizarre sexual undercurrents, sort of astonishing stuff. Anybody with an interest in old Hollywood, who can give you twenty new things in the space of twenty minutes to think about? Regarding Shirley Temple subject
I know nothing about. Okay with me, So Adam and I are happy to have Catherine Fusco join us from Reno to talk about this question, this monument, this movie known as Casablanca.
Catherine, thanks for being on.
Sure, I'm really happy to be here.
Hi film spotting, Hello, Thank you, Catherine.
Okay, So Casablanca turned seventy five this year, and it's either ageless or it's very much showing its age, depending on which pundit or film critic or cultural observer you're reading at the time. The Warner Brothers movie premiered in late nineteen forty two, but went into general release early nineteen forty three, and with the Allies invading North Africa, the movie felt like the morning news right up there on the screen. Humphrey Bogart is the idealistic but cynical
American hiding out Morocco goes from attractive isolationist. I stick my neck out for nobody, he says twice in the first twenty minutes, to committed patriotic man of action. His love for Ingrid Bergmann, who's hooked up with the resistance war hero played by Paul Henried, is sacrificed.
For the greater good.
This movie won the Oscar for Best Picture, and it is a lot of people's favorite Hollywood movie. Woody Allen wrote a play and later a movie called Play It Against Sam about a guy hopelessly measuring himself against Bogie's image. I mean, you look at Jean Lucadar's Breathless that's entirely devoted to Bogie.
You got you know what.
It's one of the most revered and satirized romantic dramas in cinema history. Several books have been written about Casablanca's place in the culture, and most recently that includes Noah Eisenberg's Will Always Have Casablanca. And Yet and Yet a lot of people think it's basically no longer ready for
its close up. In a recent Slate piece on the book and the film, Laura Miller notes that Sight and Sound magazine did a twenty thirteen poll of the fifty greatest films of all time, Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtese, did not make the cut, and she says this, what's changed about Casablanca is the most powerful and intangible element in any work of popular culture, its ability to make each audience member feel this is about me, about who I am, but most of all, who I want to be.
And she says this to America still underestimates the degree to which the Second World War casts a long shadow over the last half of the twentieth century. That shadow has mostly subsided, and the radiant dreams that consoled us as we walked through, while still worth revisiting, now seem less captivating and necessary. Adam, Catherine will start with you, Catherine, Will we always have Casablanca?
Or is it sort of.
Getting lost in the mists of time, the same mist we see Bogart and Claude Rain strolling through in the last few seconds of the film itself.
That's question. Yeah, we just have twenty seconds. We just have twenty seconds for it.
Shoot, you know, I was watching the film again yesterday to prepare and I actually got a little nervous about me on the podcast, and I thought, oh, well, maybe I should just watch every kind of great classic film. So I rewatched Citizen Kane the day before, and you know, I was thinking about that, you know, Cain as great, Casablanca as beloved kind of thing, and for me, I feel like Casablanca is this sort of gateway drug, but it's such a wonderful gateway drug, right to kind of
get get people in. So you know, I'm all about the gateway drug here, you know, whether it's not maybe as heady as Citizen Kane, right, it really just gives you that kind of gut punch. But I was also thinking about those sort of relevance now in the Laura Miller article, right, she's talking about how young men identified with this kind of cynic and less so with the more sincere rick that we get by the end. And I was just thinking, man, you know, we could use
a little sincerity and self sacrifice now. Right, we're sort of in this moment of you know, the hot take where you kind of take the position that nobody else is taking and your cynical and you kind of have your kind of anti hero perspective and I feel like we're kind of moving past that a little bit now. I think, I don't know if it's a post election moment or you know, we're kind of worn out on Tony Soprano or what. But I don't know, it feels fresh to me still.
Did you see this film at a young age, Catherine?
You know, I saw it in college, and so I was thinking also about the sort of long shadow of World War Two part of this retrospective essay. And I saw it the year before September eleventh, So I you know, I was a nineties teen and I grew up with a lot of the kind of flashy indie directors, right, So that was my initial film education as a teenagers. I was watching you know, Kevin Smith and Tarantino, and you know, that's what all of my really film educated
friends were into. And then I had a friend in college who was into classical film and we watched this film together and I just felt like, oh man, there's this whole other world of film, you know, that's cool and affecting, right, And I think that's that's again this. I really appreciate the non cynical kind of nature of the film, right that I guess you know after watching right, I remember having the flu at some point in college
and watching Natural Born Killers. Right, this is sort of the this and it just felt really.
I would get I would get the flu from that movie right, all over movies.
Yeah, so you know it was it was kind of it blew our minds really to watch this movie and all of those famous lines that you know are in the culture, but as someone who grew up being able to rent videos and not having to rely on you know what was playing on TV, having access to these lines and sort of getting hit bam bam bam. Oh that's from this film too. That's from this film too. That's from this film too. I just sort of felt like something cracked open seeing this.
So, yeah, what.
About you, Adam, how early on did you bump into it?
Yeah?
This is a perfect and why are you and why are you wearing a fedora right now?
You know I like to come in character. Okay.
I saw this for the first time, not until I was in college, when I was in film school, so it would have been actually the late nineties when I saw this movie for the first time. And this really is the ideal sort of scenario for one of these reviews because watching it again just last night, actually I realized I don't think I had seen it in the interro at all. Somehow I had never had an opportunity to see it. So I really am revisiting a film that is regarded as a classic and that I saw
originally many years ago and loved. And it felt almost like I was watching it for the first time. And that's what we're usually going for here. And it's funny. I picked out the exact same two paragraphs from the Laura Miller Slight article as you did, Michael, the one about movies in a movie like this making you think most of all of who you want to be, and then her concluding statement where she says essentially that that
is no longer the case of this movie. It maybe no longer has that power, and she says it's still worth revisiting, but less captivating and necessary. Watching it again last night, for me, I found it still as captivating as I did twenty years ago. I found it even more necessary, actually, but we can get into that later. The other aspect of that, the first part talking about every audience member feeling like this is about me or
someone who I aspire to be. I made my kids watch this with me oldest, so my son Holden just turned fifteen, and my daughter Sophie's about to be thirteen. Sophie was mostly kind of lost by all the maneuvering of the plot.
Right the film, the political stuff.
Yes, but my son Holden is this huge international diplomacy nerd. Those are the kind of games he plays computer games, and otherwise was saying.
Things like, oh, yes, the cost of block of conference was right there around that time.
Yes, he was actually Michael, and he's huge into geography, World War two in general. He's certainly not a connoisseur of classic cinema. He loved this movie, and I was sitting right next to him on the couch and I was listening to him audibly react to all these great moments and lines, lines that he, for the most part, was hearing for the first time. And at the end of it, he just said, everybody in that movie was so awesome.
Oh. I knew exactly what he.
Meant, because that comment Laura Miller had about a lot of adolescent boys maybe taking immediately to Bogee and his gruffness and his toughness and how unflappable he seems at all times except when he's around Ingrid Bergmann's ilsa. You know, that's something I think my son probably does sort of wish he had a little bit more in him, just as I do actually for that matter. And at the same time he's this selfish rogue. He's charming, of course, and he's funny, and he's in control, and at his
core he's this idealist. And so I know that Holden was reacting to this figure that he admired in some way. But it wasn't just him. It was Claude Rains, it was Peter Lourie, it was Paul Henried, it was Sidney green Street. He was responding to the performances, of course. And a moment I'll single out that I know work for both of us is when we see Renault's devilish little grin when he sees the Germans starting to sing about the Fatherland.
It's just like these fricking guys, you know. And I just love that we get those those kind of reactions.
We get so many moments like that, wonderful faces throughout this whole film. But he really was invested in not just the plot, but just these characters and those lines of dialogue. And yes, he did discover that in one of his games, there's a badge or something that's called the here's looking at you kid badge. Never understood it, well, guess what. It's something you get when you go from
like Portugal to Casablanca or vice versa. So that clicked for him and it felt it felt relevant to him, that's for sure, but it felt even more relevant to me for some of the political reasons that you touched on, Catherine.
I think we can get into that a little bit.
Yeah.
I think the thing that I think is a little nutty about the Laura Miller piece and Slade is this idea that it's not, you know, an admirable architect. There's nobody to kind of look up to and aspire to. And I think especially I can only speak as a high school age you know, male in Racine, Wisconsin is probably see him for the first time when I was I don't know, fourteen or fifteen, probably on TV and
then I saw early date. For me, you know, I took my high school girlfriend, Sheila Hogan up to Milwaukee to see, you know, a revival screening. This is like in seventy eight seventy nine, and I mean, think of that, that's forty It's almost forty years ago when the film was turning seventy five. So you know, it means it just lived in the culture for me in a way that it does not for even people who adore it, who are you know, ten twenty twenty five years younger than me.
It's it's it's just not the same.
I was wondering about that though. I was looking this time at the moment we first see Bogart and we see first a cigarette, right, and a cocktail, and then we see his face, and you know, I've been sort of struggling with that last moment of the essay we're talking about where she says that this is less captivating and necessary, and I was just thinking, well, you know
what about Don Draper. Weren't there all these little kind of wanna be Don Draper's running around because people are really into the fact there's the smoking and the cocktail culture and all this stuff, and you know, it's there's still that kind of I guess hipness, but you know it's much less shallow in some ways. Right, this is a character I don't know who who sort of has this history of goodness and the sacrifice that he gets into. Right, so we get the kind of style and surface here.
I think that it still does feel, you know, pretty you know, he seems pretty cool to me.
Yeah, yeah, I think I think there's a couple of things that have been, you know, the best one of the best things in that Laura Miller essay. And I don't want to talk about that too much, but but is she I think she rightly so really dings. Woody Allen's play and movie played against Sam Hard for including a line like I never saw a dame that didn't understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a forty five. That's what the imaginary Bogie says
in that play. You know, Bulgart never would have said a goddamn thing like that. I mean, that's a mini Ricky, right. Anybody Bogart ever played that is not that line. Is Mickey Spillane or Mike Hammer. It has not got anything with Bogie or or Cozublanca.
It just isn't.
And one of the things, if anything, you can kind of look at Casablanca and say that the guy you can argue that the rick is really mired and self pity and and you know, heartbreak.
And that's.
But to me, that's what makes makes this kind of glorious Hollywood schlock a little bit human. I mean, this is not this is I don't want to. I mean, it's a film I really love. At the same time, I understand completely why the Side and Sound Pole wouldn't make room for it in its top fifty. I don't think I would either. It's just not it's not the kind of classic that you look to for form, even
though it's for what it is. It's extremely adroitly made, yes, and gorgeously cast, and and there's you know, there's a reason people go back to it, And a lot of it is the writing, which they were, My god, they were right. They were the story of how this thing barely got made, you know, rewriting every night and every morning and not even knowing who is going to end up with who by the end of it. You know, it gives it gives the movie kind of a peculiar tension,
and I think you can feel it. It's kind of a it's kind of a meta thing going on, where you know, all these characters in Cosabonca don't know if they're getting out in the narrative.
And yet and at the.
Same time, the Epstein brothers and uh and and all the other all the other folks working on the movie. You know, they didn't really know where they were going with this adaptation of an unproduced play.
You know, they just didn't know. But it's a movie that it's a kind of classic quote classic.
You can show people that it's not an intimidating kind of you know, it's more about comforting content and rather than challenging form. And therefore, I think it's kind of the opposite of something like Citizen Kane, which is not trying to make you cry, is not trying.
To move you in a conventional way.
You might find Kane fascinating and moving and all kinds of things, but it's not I mean, they are completely different temperatures, these two things.
Yes, Kurtis is definitely not trying to show his hand at work. And that said, Catherine, you mentioned the intro or introduction to Bogie here and Michael you talk about maybe this isn't a movie that is drawing a lot of attention to its form, but the craft of it in terms of how the screenplay and the visuals work together.
I think this movie has one of the all time great setups and introductions to a character, because not only do we only see those parts of him first, but even before that happens, we see his name when the plane is flying in one of the first, one of the first shots, we see his name, and so immediately we're kind of wondering who is Rick and why is
he being featured so prominently that early on? And then at least three or four times people talk about Rick before we even meet him, and there's all this talk about what once we do finally meet him, there's all this talk about what would impress him?
Right UGARTI talks about.
Yeah, So by the time we do meet him, we can't wait to finally see what this guy is all about. It's really heightened in that way. And then, as I said, when we do finally get to see him, he's someone who we know everyone else is in some way looking up to or trying to impress, and that makes us then revere him a little bit more even as a character.
I think another thing that stood out to me this time that I really liked is the way the Paul Henried character is in a lot of ways equal to Bogie, and I can just I can speak for my son and say that he felt that way. Like I mean, Bogie is still Bogey, don't get me wrong, right, And he's the he's the star of the film. I'm sure
everyone revers him more. But he could have been played Henri, could have been played as this sort of bland I'm gonna probably get myself into trouble saying us around two historians such as yourselves, but a Ray Miland type character who maybe is kind of the just the straight guy and he's meant to be the foil Ralph Bellamy. That's who I am thinking of, exactly. But Bob Cummings maybe so. But here we have a guy who is someone who
actually impresses Rick. Right, He impresses Rick. You see that every time they interact with you, nobody else does.
He's escaped from the concentration camp.
Right.
He's truly brave, he truly acts on his convictions. He's also good looking and smart and eloquent. And so what that does is that heightens that tension where we are legitimately torn. I think as viewers in our allegiances as much as we revere Bogie It isn't just about who's she's going to choose. It's about the conflict of knowing she could be great with both, and yeah, probably better off as as Bogie ultimately decides with Victor. But I do feel like we're torn partly because we see him
as an equal to Rick in some ways. Then the movie could have chosen another route.
You must know, it's very important I get out of Casablanca. It's my privilege to be one of the leaders of a great movement. You know what I've been doing. You know what it means to the work, to the lives of thousands and thousands of people, that I'd be free to reach America and continue my work. I'm not interested in politics. The problems of the world are not in my department. I'm a saloon keeper. My friends in the underground tell me you've quite a record. You ran guns
to Ethiopia, you fought against the fascists in Spain. Whatever. Isn't it strange that you always happened to be fighting on the side of the underdog. Yes, and I found that a very expensive hobby too, But then I never was much of a business man.
I think I disagree with you a little bit this time through, I was feeling that the love triangle was really kind of eat it in one point A little bit this time I wonder, you know, a lot of as you were saying, of what we learn about people come through dialogue that other people are speaking. And I was wondering, you know, I think so much of the respect that we feel for the Laslow character comes through
what other people say about him. I mean, for the longest time, I couldn't figure out, you know, what does this guy feel about his wife?
No, that's that's valid. So yeah, so.
This this time I felt that I think a little more strongly that the you know, the weight of a Rick versus Lazlo.
There.
There is another one other quick screenwriting thing I really like here that I picked up on this time is we know why Ilsa left him at the train station. We figure it out because the screenplay gives us hints
along the way before Rick figures it out. And I like that when when the movie lets the audience sort of figure out something and and then we're waiting for him to finally catch up to things a little bit, and it allows us also to see him as as fallible, like he's he's missing part of the story and he's wallowing in self pity and that tempers the coolness of his character.
Yeah, without that, I think you got you got a very boring character. And I mean this, And Paul Henriy hated making this movie. He thought his he thought the Laso character was nothing but functionary and you know, nothing, nothing much to play. But I think what, I really what,
I really noticed this this time through. And I hadn't seen the movie front to back in many years, but I saw it the other day and and I do, I really do think the first forty forty five minutes is kind of terrific Hollywood studio filmmaking.
It's really crisp.
I mean, Michael Critisis has always been sort of a compelling a minus director for me, you know, and I just sort of enjoyed things like and this sounds totally wonky and like off off narrative, But nobody could film a car doing pulling up at high speeds as the camera dolly's in on in a diagonal and Michael, it's just Critisie is always moving the camera in a dolly on a diagonal in a way the totally is dynamic, and you know, I love it when he's like zipping
into a nightclub or just sort of dealing with backlot scenes of this sort of airsats Cosablanca, you know, I mean, you know, it's a lot closer to Van Nuys or Thousand Oaks than Cosablanca, the whole kind of atmosphere of the picture. But it's sort of irresistible anyway.
Now Van Nuys just doesn't have the ring to it though.
No, it doesn't. No, I wouldn't have called it Van Nis.
No.
But there's there's a close up on Bergmann when she finally gets which one, when she finally gets Sam the piano player played by Dooley Wilson to play and sing as time goes by, right, the Herman Hupfeld song from nineteen thirty one, which enjoyed this amazing resurgence after the film came out twelve years later. And it's a twenty six second close up with just the piano, and that there's so many great things about that twenty six seconds.
A Max Steiner's score, the musical score finally has to shut the hell up and just let the piano do it. And Steiner's you know, I love some of his stuff, but not a lot, and I think he's kind of always big footing the action. That's an amazing twenty six second and that to me that felt like, Okay, I'm in and I'm not in like watching it like in.
Sort of a you know, interested observer way.
I just thought, that's that feels completely fresh, and a lot of it's just her beauty, I suppose, but a lot of it's just every everything else that's conspiring to make that moment great. Then then there's a kind of a bookend shot where Boguart is drunk and he's you know, drunkenly saying you've played it for her, you can play it for me, play it. And that shot is kind
of a medium shot. It's this and that's almost a full minute fifty seven seconds, and then that sort of fades into the you know what a lot of people think is kind of one of the weaker five minutes of the picture, which is the Paris flashback, right, But that but that minute of just a single shot where Bogart is sort of muttering a couple things incomprehensible, that again is like, now this is screen acting, you know, and this is and that's that's where you realize there
are feelings at stake, and I think even in this sort of Hollywood fairy tale, and I don't want to diminish the film and I don't want to inflate it. I just sort of feel like if people don't know Costablanca, they just kind of need to find out for themselves where they land in it. And I, you know, if you happen to land on a situation, in a position where you feel yourself out, I don't really get the fuss. Well, welcome to my experience with It's a wonderful life every year,
you know. I mean, you know, but Costablanca is not that for me. I found myself kind of newly falling into it happily, especially the first half.
I think there is.
Something a little progressively weaker about the film, although I adore the way it ends.
And maybe it's just.
Because some of the desperation with the screenwriting as they were writing on the fly. Maybe there's just one too many scenes where somebody pulls a gun and it's supposed to be a surprise and then it's a reversal. But the first forty five minutes to me, is like, is absolutely irresistible popcorn.
Yeah, the last thirty minutes or so, Michael, I think I'm with you a little bit that you certainly become aware or I did, that there's a real life lack of stakes. The Nazis are never a threat in this movie, not even remotely, And I think maybe that's something that that Hawks when he did his version of this and to have and have not he improved on that one thing, which is actually making the Nazis a little bit scary well and menacing.
Right, And even though Warners and hal Wails were very we're very forward progressive thinkers in terms of the Hollywood power structure about let's deal with what's actually happening in the war today, other people took him much longer to kind of embrace, you know, the sort of the anti Nazi propaganda movement in and this is you know, yes, this film in a way defines anti Nazi propaganda films, but it does it in a way that, thank god,
you know, transcends sort of the weaker stuff. And I mean, just a year before Bogart did a film with John Houston, arguably a greater director, I think, inarguably greater director at his best than Curtiche but you know, called Across the Pacific, right, And that's a film that's you know, pretty interesting and
pretty fun. And then it's there's all this kind of cheap, you know, really kind of egregious, you know, anti Japanese stereotyping, which of course was just rampant all through Hollywood for three four years. And uh, and that film it just isn't it Just it's instructive, I think, to see Across the Pacific kind of in relation to cosmogity, just to see how one is you know, interesting for its time. One one you know, whether you love it or not, has has happily transcended its time.
Do you think the middle right the sort of turning point. I wanted to kind of argue about the or not argue, but just say a little about the stakes of the romance. One of the things that I really like about the style is one of those moments where the gun gets pulled, but when Ilsa pulls the gun on Rick. And one of the things that I think this this film does that's really interesting is the stakes that it brings to the romance. Right, that whole scene looks like it's straight out of a film noir.
Right.
I think there's even you know, the Venetian wind kind of shadows across Ilso's face at one moment, and you know that that's the sort of violence that's all around these people. It heightens sort of the stakes of the romance. But I think I think there is that real sense of, you know, the violence in love that comes across here, right, that he has been devastated by her, that she, you know,
has this kind of painful, almost bodily need for forgiveness. Right, And we get, you know, stylistically, that feeling of danger there, and yeah, we get the gun pull at the end. But I think I think this film is good about kind of activating the violence that goes along with romantic portrayal and things like that.
Yeah, I think that's valid.
And yet I did find myself this time feeling actually more suspense and worrying more about how that poor Bulgarian wife and her husband would end up than I did Rick and Ilsa. To be totally honest, I was more invested in that almost than I was how things were going to end up with this little love triangle. But I am curious Katherin for your your thoughts on on Bergmann, because Michael talked.
Their very eloquently.
But to the surprises this time for me were Bogie's vulnerability, and we touched on that a little bit. I mean, I think that's one of the all time great playing drunk scenes, honestly, and that close up you talk about, But maybe Bogie didn't need much practice, and who knows, he might have been doing some actual method acting there, I suppose in that scene. But it's great and that vulnerability.
I only remembered the Bogie that sort of gets shown depicted in the Woody Allen movie, and it's much different than that. But for reasons I can't completely articulate, and maybe that's just what you chalk up to being movie magic. Bergman really is incredible here, and it's every long and close up with that gauzy lighting and that one in particular that you focused on Michael. But I just think that she ends up carrying the emotional weight of this
movie on her shoulders. While everyone else gets all the snappy dialogue and they get all the entertaining stuff, She's actually saddled with most of the conflict and the internal struggle and that last line. As much as I love the ending, watching it with a modern perspective, let's say there is that last bit where he says, Elsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
And then he adds someday you'll understand that, which just seems to me, this this ultimate bit of man's planning right back in the forties.
It's important to end a great line with a totally patronizing exactly.
You know.
I think that so much of it is understood is his sacrifice. But she's sort of being packed off with the man that I think it's clear she loves less, right, I mean, and I think we rarely frame the film in those terms.
But I agree with you. I was watching her. I think it's when she goes She's wearing this kind of great shirt and she's got this wrap around her waist and she strides into a room, and I was just thinking about the kind of energy which which she enters that room to have her you know, confrontation with Rick. I mean, she's she's going to confront him, right. Yeah, I agree with you about the way she carries the film.
Yeah, I think she is.
But I did want to add that last line. By that last line, I kind of wanted her to say, back to Bogie, wait, I'm the one who needs perspective here. I mean, she lost her husband to the Holocaust, thought he died, went through all that grief and heartbreak, moved on, found happiness, only to go through more heartbreak, and now she's fully committed to him in the cause, despite whatever suffering that may cause her. But she's the one who somehow needs to understand the consequence of all this.
This is where you really kind of kind of, I think, feel the mechanics of desperate screenwriting at work, you know, you know what I mean, where you just feel whatever, whatever the whatever, the need was, the perceived need to have a line like that, or you know, there's a very fine line I think that separates the wonderful individual lines often quoted, endlessly quoted lines from Casablanca from the ones you don't you know, And it's just I mean,
it's all the same people writing them, but it's you know that happened. I think I think one thing that you talked about this earlier, Catherine, when I saw this film, really saw it for the first time in high school,
back in the seventies. It really came as kind of this completely bracing antidote to all the cynical seventies era stuff I had been seeing my whole you know, young movie going life, I mean everything from you know, I saw a movie like the Long Goodbye Almans film, which is essentially you know, you got it's basically kind of making fun of the Boguart image, the way Elliott Gould's playing full of Marlow when Bogart played Marlow obviously in
the Big Site. But you know, it's like I saw, I saw all the really kind of rancid, sour, disillusioned stuff after or before I saw where all was coming from, which is cosa blanca. And is it a guy's movie? Is it a is it kind of a boy's life fantasy?
Yeah, it is, it is.
And it's also kind of a you know, you know, the attractive American male loaner. You know, he's really kind of the moral compass and the savior and the hero and all that. And yet and yet I think I think it's kind of crazy to not look at that and say, you know, actually, as you know, you have a more at least that character starts from at a point A and gets the point B or C by the end. He you know it is. It is not
simply a stalwart, boring American action hero. You know, it's a guy who you know, it's as you as as you say, it's you know, he's an idealist, he's he's kind of a failed idealist at the beginning. And you know, you hear whispers about what brought him to Casablanca and why did he actually have to leave America. You never really learned too many details, and you never even find out why why he won't be let back.
Into the country, into the US.
But you get I think you get notions, you know, however, kind of hammily treated, notions of you know, self sacrifice and doing doing the right thing and all that and and uh and man's plaining absolutely.
Little bit at that.
It's distributed though. I mean, if you want to talk about those Bulgarians right, the Bulgarian young woman right there, they're Bulgarian ran right, you see her really kind of
taking charge. I mean, if you want to talk about an uneven love triangle, right, the triangle between her and Renault, and there's this kind of confused husband who's off losing money through letwheel or whatever he's doing, right, but she's really taking charge in that relationship, and you can sort of imagine a world in which that's ilsa.
I think that's that's a great point.
And they had to dance around that a little bit because the Haze Code wouldn't the Hayes office wouldn't le him, They wouldn't let him spell it out too clearly that Renaul is basically, you know, sleep with blackmailing him for yeah, yeah, saying you sleep with me and I'll give you the
letters of transit, a completely fictional, fictional construct. By the way, there was no such thing as quote letters of transit in this point, and the screenwriters kept kept waiting for them to be kind of found out and called on the cover for it.
Nobody did.
Yeah, well, I don't think we want to push the comparison too far. But going back to what we started with talking about relevancy or timeliness this movie in nineteen ninety eight, when I saw it, I appreciated it purely as this piece of entertainment and art that I was considering and having to write a paper about and all
those things. But watching it now, when you see and hear all the talk of refugees and the sacrifices speaking of that Bulgarian couple they have to make in search of a better life, and talk of travel permits and people being detained in question, and of a country isolating itself from the rest of the world, and of a resistance to tyranny. It can't help but feel a little bit of this time right now. And even more than
that for me is Michael. What we talked about when we did our show, the Live Show post election, where we shared our top five movies to console and restore hope. And what I kind of argued there was that consolation isn't enough, Hope isn't enough. Hope really comes from action.
And if you're dissatisfied now with our leadership or whatever the message we're sending to the rest of the world, you can either be rick or you can be Renault and accept that this is the way the world works and kind of cynically just go ahead with your life or even try to exploit it in some way for your own gain, or you can actually stick your neck
out for somebody instead of nobody. And I think the value of that message and the vitality of that message is probably heightened for certain generations versus others, and we're in one of those those times right now. But it's also that type of message that I think every generation probably could find its own.
Core totally, totally.
And this film I got, Like a lot of great Hollywood successes, let's say, you can read it any way you like, and the politics and the ideology is there if you want it.
I guarantee that in nineteen forty.
Three, you know, a lot of a lot of Americans were probably still not I mean, they were suddenly very not you know, kind of like immediately struck by the horrors of what it means to send off a son or a husband or whatever to war, and they were very conflicted about it, even though there was no looking back.
But I think today, you know, you get when you have a president who really is literally rounding up the usual suspects all the time, and it's not a laugh line like it is when when Claude Raine says it, you know, this is I agree. I mean, I mean what I what struck me this time watching Cosa Blaco was that the the film and Rick as played by Bolgart It's really it's really just a Parallel for America, kind of blithely not wanting to get into it and then realizing, you know, it's the.
Right thing to do, Let's get in there.
And you know, I think today when as you say, Adam so eloquently, no, truly, I mean that was It's it's a film that forces you to kind of reckon with this question of you know, you know, luck and happenstance and who and where you were born and the time you were born in and who's who's what government you're sort of you know, you know, at the whim of And I think that's why that's why the movie works. I think I think it's got this compression even though
it's complete with fakery. It's back Loot Morocco, you know, but it's it. But the casting is what makes it feel authentic. You have you know, out of this entire speaking cast, there are three American born actors, that is it. Everybody else came from somewhere else. And a lot of these folks were literal war refugees. As we know, aly's a call lost you know, family members in the Holocaust who play you know, any number of these supporting character actors.
You know, they're from Austria, Germany and France, all of them and that, and that's why the movie doesn't just feel like a Hollywood product.
It feels like.
It's it's a Hollywood product, but it's got it's got a flavor all its own.
Yes, Backlot Morocco. By the way, the name of my high school band. Catherine Fusco teaches at the University of Nevada. A reno for recent book is called Silent Film and US Naturalist Literature. Catherine, anything else you want to plug any more information about where our listeners can find your work?
Sure?
So.
I will have a book coming out with my friend Nicole Seymour about Kelly Reichhart in the next year, and you can follow me on Twitter at Fussco.
Writes Reikert, one of our favorites here on film Spotting. So we'll definitely have to have you back on when that book comes out. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you great talking with you, Katherine.
Good to talk to you.
It might be a good idea for you to disappear from because a black up for a while. There's a free French Cadison number of prose of you. I could be induced to arrange a passage my letter of transit. I could use the trip. It doesn't make any difference about it. I bet you still only ten thousand francs, and that ten thousand francs should pay out expensive our expensive mm h, Louis. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
That was fun talking about Casablanca with Michael and Catherine. Thanks to everyone who checked out that archive episode. And if you're listening and you're not a Film Spotting Family member, check that out at film spotting Family dot com. Access to the archive just one of the benefits, along with bonus shows, a weekly newsletter, early access to events and discounts, and you get to be part of the Film Spotting Family discord. There's a bunch of good stuff again film Spottingfamily dot com.
Thanks for listening.
This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Good Bye.