Saturday, August 05, 2017
Here’s Looking at You Again, Kid
Just when I think I’ve seen the 1942 American film Casablanca about as many times as a human being should be allowed to do, along comes an event—such as this morning’s reassessment of the movie on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday—that sends me back for another viewing. Maybe it’s also time for me to buy a copy of Noah Isenberg’s We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie (2016), which I can enjoy reading and later place on my bookshelves next to a 1973 hardcover copy of Howard Koch’s Casablanca: Script and Legend.
There are many great scenes in Casablanca, and NPR’s Scott Simon referenced a few of those this morning, including the one in which German and French patrons of Rick's Café Américain in Casablanca, Morocco, compete in the singing pf patriotic songs (a segment I previously mentioned in relation to actress Madeleine LeBeau’s death last year). But the one everyone remembers best, of course, is the one embedded above, featuring Dooley Wilson, Ingrid Bergman, and Humphrey Bogart. “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’”
That damn song always makes my eyes tear up a bit.
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4 comments:
The first thing my husband and I found that we had in common (besides loving to read) was a love for Casablanca (nearly 40 years ago). He just purchased the Isenberg book about the movie. We still watch the movie every year.
It's only the best film ever made. And you can tell that to Charles Foster Kane!
There's a screening of it in my neck of the woods in two weeks. I'll be there. Might even wear my fedora. I've tried to see this film on the bog screen a couple of times in the past, but fate was against me. Third time's a charm. Hopefully.
By the way, great site you have here.
Thanks for that. Deep down the story really is about the nature of love. After several selfish egotistical frames of mine, Rick finally realizes that he really does love her in the true sense, and in the end he puts her happiness before his own.
Not many crime novels have love this way, but some do. Nelson DeMille's THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER has some of Casablanca in the opening lines, which I quoted on my old blog, LITTLE KNOWN GEMS, at this link:
http://trackofthecat.blogspot.com/2011/02/books-about-books-casablanca-revisited.html
I quit my blog after my wife died, but as I have now remarried and happy again, I may reopen it or another, this time with a more crime-novel accent.
CASABLANCA has a deep influence, of course. I was stationed at a Navy Communications station at Sidi Yahia, Morocco, back in 1967 and I used to go to the American Bar in Casablanca, aptly called Rick's, at least by us.
The bar in the original Star Wars movie was a funny take-off on Rick's, and it inspired Larry Niven's funny THE DRACO TAVERN as well as several Spider Robinson collections such as CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON.
And we'll always have Paris.
Coincidentally, heard "As Time Goes By" on the radio just yesterday. (Our son Dash, now 5, has taken a liking to swing music, so we've been tuned into SiriusXM's 40s Junction lately--can't argue with good taste.)
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