Casablanca (1942)

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 11:40:18 +0000

Casablanca (1942)

The most beloved Academy Award Best Picture winner of all, this romatic war melodrama epitomizes the 194os craze for studio-bound exotica, with the Warners lot transformed into a fantastical North Africa that has far more resonance than any mere real place possibly could. Casablanca also offers more cult performers, quotable lines, instant clichés, and Hollywood chutzpah than any other film of the movies’ golden age.

Humphrey Bogart’s Rick (“of all the gin joints…”), in white dinner jacket or belted trenchcoat, and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa (“I know that I’ll never have the strength to leave you again”), a vision in creations more suited to a studio floor than a desert city, moon over each other in a café-casino as that haunting tune (“As Time Goes By”) tinkles in the background, transporting them back to a simpler life before the war soured everything. But the best performance comes from Claude Rains as the cynical but romantic police chief Renault (“round up the usual suspects”), a wry observer of life’s absurdities who is at once an opportunist survivor and the film’s truest romantic—fully deserving of the famous final moments (“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”) that show it is he not Ilsa who is the fitting partner for Rick’s newly-dedicated-to-freedom hero.

Also memorable in an enormous supporting cast: Paul Henreid’s Czech patriot Victor Laszlo, leading the scum of the continent in a rousing rendition of “La Marseilleise” that drowns out the Nazi sing-along and restores even the most ardent collaborationists and parasites to patriotic fervor; Peter Lorre’s hustler Ugarte, shyly admitting that he trusts Rick because the man despises him; Conrad Veldt’s heel-clicking Nazi villain Major Strasser, reaching to make a phone call he’ll never complete; Dooley Wilson’s loyal Sam, stroking the piano and exchanging looks with the leads; S. Z. Sakall’s blubbery majordomo Carl, a displaced Austro-Hungarian sweating despite the ceiling fan; and Sydney Greenstreet’s unlikely Arab-Italian entrepreneur Ferrari, squatting befezzed on what looks like a magic carpet. Even the extras are brilliantly cast, adding to the lively, seductive, populated feel of a movie that, more than any other, its fans have wanted to inhabit—an impulse that fuels Woody Allen’s charming homage in Play It Again Sam.

Curtiz tells a complicated, gimmicky story, weighted down with exposition and structured around a midpoint Paris flashback that breaks most of the screenwriting rules, with so little fuss and so much confidence that the whole assembly seems seamless even though it was apparently rewritten from day to day so that Bergman did not know until the shooting of the final scene whether she would fly off with Henreid or stick around with Bogey. Lasting cult greatness came about through its attitude, but also its rare sense of the incomplete— made before the war was over, it dares to leave its characters literally up in the air or out in the desert, leaving its original audiences and the many who have discovered the film over the years to wonder what happened to these people (whose petty problems don’t amount to hill of beans”) during the next few turbulent years.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1942, Genre – Drama, Country – U.S.A, Language – English / French / German, Producer – Hal B. Wallis, Jack L. Warner, Director – Michael Curtiz, Music Director – M.K. Jerome, Jack Scholl, Max Steiner, Cast – Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veldt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall, Madeleine LeBeau, Dooley Wilson, Joy Page, John Qualen, Leonid Kinskey, Curt Bois

Citizen Kane (1941)

admin — Thu, 06 May 2010 11:33:35 +0000

Citizen Kane (1941)

Since 1962, Sight & Sound magazine’s oft-cited critics’ poll of the greatest films ever made has placed Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s remarkable debut film, at the top of the list. By 1998, the American Film Institute called it the greatest movie of all time. It also garnered Best Picture awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, and won an Oscar for its screenplay. The legend of Citizen Kane has partly been fueled by the fact that Welles was only 24 when he made the film, but also from the obvious comparisons between the titular character and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who moved heaven and earth to stop the picture from being made and then, when not stopped from being distributed, he tried to discredit it. But beyond the ridiculous hype of any single film being “the greatest movie of all time,” Citizen Kane is of tremendous interest and importance, for a number of reasons.

The film tells a great story: Charles Foster Kane (played brilliantly by Welles himself) is born poor, but strikes it rich through a gold mine bequeathed to his mother. As a young man he begins to assemble a populist newspaper and radio empire, eventually marrying the niece of an American president and running for governor. But any ambition he has for real power is stymied. As Kane becomes alienated from his power, he becomes increasingly abusive to the women in his life, first his wife, then his mistress. He dies, almost alone, in his reconstructed but unfinished castle, longing for the simplicity of his childhood. Firmly within the traditions of New Deal populism, Citizen Kane extols the very American perspective that money cannot buy happiness, but in a highly prosaic, almost Dickensian way.

More significantly, Citizen Kane begins with Kane’s death, and the enigmatic final word he utters: “Rosebud”. A group of intrepid newsreel reporters try to discover the meaning of this last word and interview several of Kane’s acquaintances. Not only is the film told in flashback, but each character only knows the man from a certain perspective, which is presented in due course. The film’s narrative complexity, without ever violating Classical Hollywood narrative continuity and causality, is a remarkable tour de force, responsible in large part for critic Pauline Kael’s accusation that the film’s true genius lay not in the hands of wunderkind Welles, but in those of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.

The film’s real power, though, lies in its cinematography: Gregg Toland developed a technique for deep-focus photography, wherein the extreme foreground, central middle- ground, and background were all in focus at the same time, allowing the eye to focus on any part of the image. This technique was criticized at the time for calling attention to itself, in direct violation of the codes of Classical Hollywood cinematography, wherein good photography was assumed to be invisible. Even by today’s different standards, Citizen Kane’s cinematography is striking and unforgettable.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1941, Genre – Drama, Country – U.S.A, Language – English, Producer – Orson Welles, Richard Baer, George Schaefer, Director – Orson Welles, Music Director – Bernard Herrmann, Charlie Barnet, Pepe Guitar, Cast – Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, William Alland, Paul Stewart, George Coulouris, Fortunio Bonanova, Gus Schilling, Philip Van Zandt, Georgia Backus, Harry Shannon

Cineplot.com » Drama

Casablanca (1942)

Cast and Production Credits

Citizen Kane (1941)

Cast and Production Credits