Speaker 1: Oh he is, folks, it's show tied.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater, they are cold, sodas,
Speaker 3: popcorn and no monsters.
Speaker 4: In the protection booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 5: Off carsa Blanca city of hope and despair, located in
Speaker 5: French Morocco in North Africa, the meeting place of adventurers, fugitives, criminals.
Speaker 5: Refugees lord into this danger swept oasis by the hope
Speaker 5: of escape to the Americas. But they're all trapped, for
Speaker 5: there is no escape. Against this fascinating background is woven
Speaker 5: the story of an imperishable love and the enthralling saga
Speaker 5: of six desperate people, each in Casablanca to keep an
Speaker 5: appointment with destiny. I was willing to shoot Captain Rhino,
Speaker 5: and I'm willing to shoot you, all right, Major.
Speaker 4: You asked for it.
Speaker 1: You knew much.
Speaker 6: Shy loved.
Speaker 1: How much I still love you. I know a good
Speaker 1: deal more about you than you suspect. I know, for instance,
Speaker 1: that you're in love with a woman, perhaps a strange
Speaker 1: circumstance that you both should love the same woman.
Speaker 7: What do you want for Salem? I don't buy and
Speaker 7: sell human being. It's too bad. As Catser Black is
Speaker 7: leaving commodity.
Speaker 5: You can ask any price you want, but you must
Speaker 5: give me those letters version no deal, all right.
Speaker 1: I tried to reason with you.
Speaker 2: I tried everything.
Speaker 5: Now I want those letters more.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Projection booth. I'm your host. Mike White
Speaker 2: joined me once again. It's mister Bill Ackerman.
Speaker 6: This sort of takes a sting out of being occupied,
Speaker 6: doesn't it.
Speaker 2: Also joining the booth for the first time is Federico Bertolini.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much for having me. Mike. It's a
Speaker 8: pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2: We are wrapping up another month of Patreon requests with
Speaker 2: one from Brian to Zatori. It's maybe the most obscure
Speaker 2: film we've ever discussed on the show, and I feel
Speaker 2: really bad that so few people will have a chance
Speaker 2: to see it. It's a nineteen forty two film from
Speaker 2: director Michael Curtiz, Aasa Blanca. It's the story of Rick Blaine,
Speaker 2: played by Humphrey Bogart, the owner of a nightclub in
Speaker 2: Morocco whose place is populated by immigrants trying to escape
Speaker 2: the ever expanding Nazi occupation of Europe and Africa. He's
Speaker 2: visited by a figure from the past, Elsa Lund played
Speaker 2: by Ingrid Bergmann, who chooses his out of all the
Speaker 2: gin joints in all the towns in all the world
Speaker 2: to walk into with her husband, Victor Laslow play by
Speaker 2: Paul Heinried. I don't know if we can actually spoil
Speaker 2: this film for anyone, but nothing is off the table.
Speaker 2: You have been warned. So Bill, can you remember the
Speaker 2: very first time you saw Casablanca and what you thought?
Speaker 6: This is probably the hardest of all the episodes I've
Speaker 6: done with you to think of what the first time
Speaker 6: I saw Casablanca. My parents were big Bogart fans. I
Speaker 6: think this was my dad's favorite movie. So even as
Speaker 6: a little kid, some of the very first videotapes we
Speaker 6: had where Humphrey Bogart movies taped off tea like, So
Speaker 6: Casablanca was something that I saw scenes of as far
Speaker 6: back as I can remember seeing any movies. The first
Speaker 6: time I can remember watching it as a movie start
Speaker 6: to finish where I was conscious of it. I think
Speaker 6: I was already by that point familiar with the cast
Speaker 6: from crime and horror movies that I liked as a
Speaker 6: kid because Peter Lorie. I knew from the Mister Moto movies,
Speaker 6: Claude Rains, I knew from The Invisible Man and The Wolfman,
Speaker 6: Conrad Vite. I think I even saw The Cabinet Doctor
Speaker 6: Kyle Gary, and I had seen the Maltese Falcons, so
Speaker 6: I knew Sidney Green Street and Hungry Bogart. For me,
Speaker 6: it was interesting just to see it as someone over
Speaker 6: interested in like exotic adventure kind of stories, like the
Speaker 6: kind of Casa Blank and normal tells. I think I
Speaker 6: was interested in it as like a genre film because
Speaker 6: of all the face I knew from crime and horror movies.
Speaker 6: It's one that I think I liked it the first
Speaker 6: time I saw it watching as a proper movie, but
Speaker 6: I got interested in going down the rabbit hole of
Speaker 6: old Hollywood. Casablanca was the film that really summed up
Speaker 6: This is not a unique thing to observe, but like
Speaker 6: everything I liked about old Hollywood, it looks seemed to
Speaker 6: have every piece of it, from the sarcastically funny, brave,
Speaker 6: imperfect guys with their friendships, from a Howard Hawkes kind
Speaker 6: of move, the romantic melodrama with the atmosphere of the cinematography,
Speaker 6: like everything that I like in old Hollywood. It seems
Speaker 6: to capture all of it. It was intimidating to agree
Speaker 6: to do this, but I think, you know, I thought
Speaker 6: about my dad, you know, when you put out the
Speaker 6: list of titles, like I should talk to Mike about Casablanca.
Speaker 6: So my first viewing like probably like thirteen years old
Speaker 6: that I can remember for sure. Yeah, no shock, I liked.
Speaker 7: It a lot.
Speaker 2: And Frederica, how about yourself?
Speaker 8: I was thirteen about the same age. I actually remember this.
Speaker 8: I saw it on VHS, the fiftieth anniversary edition, the
Speaker 8: white one with both of them on the cover, not
Speaker 8: the theatrical poster, on a CRT television, placed on top
Speaker 8: of my clothes Jessert and I loved it. It's just
Speaker 8: one of those films that's classic Hollywood. It was made
Speaker 8: even better when a couple of years after that, I
Speaker 8: got to see it in an old movie palace with
Speaker 8: a humongous crowd and at home. The script reads one
Speaker 8: way where you're just by yourself in solitude and you
Speaker 8: fall in love with Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart and
Speaker 8: Ingrid Bergmann, but in a movie palace full of people.
Speaker 8: You can feel the beats and how fast and precise
Speaker 8: the writing is. It's almost musical in its tenor. And
Speaker 8: then having said all of that about the cultural background
Speaker 8: and learning about all the references and seeing it in
Speaker 8: pop culture and media, I think the actual reason I
Speaker 8: went to watch it was I used to see the
Speaker 8: BBC series As Time Goes By on pds, the one
Speaker 8: with Judy Dench and Jeffrey Palmer, and I always wanted
Speaker 8: to know where the song was from, looked it up
Speaker 8: and found the VHS and I watched it that way.
Speaker 2: I was late to this movie. I think I told
Speaker 2: the story when we did the episode on the multice Falcon.
Speaker 2: That was probably the first time I actually sat down
Speaker 2: and watched the Humphrey Bogart film when I was probably
Speaker 2: about twenty twenty one, and it's funny. I was just
Speaker 2: looking up the date of the Aljan Hermit's book Round
Speaker 2: Up the Usual Suspects and Making of Casablanca Bogart Bergmann
Speaker 2: in World War Two that was given to me as
Speaker 2: a birthday gift, probably the year came out, because it
Speaker 2: came out December first, nineteen ninety three, or sorry, the
Speaker 2: year after because my birthday is in April, so it
Speaker 2: was probably either a birthday or graduation present, And ironically
Speaker 2: I hadn't seen the movie at that point. I first
Speaker 2: saw this probably in ideal conditions. They were doing a
Speaker 2: screening series down at the beautifully restored Fox Theater here
Speaker 2: in Detroit, and I went to go see that there.
Speaker 2: I saw that one, I saw Spartacus. I can't remember
Speaker 2: what else played their Citizen Pain. I believe you can
Speaker 2: never go wrong with going to see Citizen Pain for
Speaker 2: the fiftieth sixtieth time. But this was the first time
Speaker 2: seeing Casablanc was seeing it at a movie palace and
Speaker 2: just absolutely fell in love with it. And it really
Speaker 2: kind of your guys's points, like it locked in a
Speaker 2: lot of references that I was very familiar with but
Speaker 2: didn't know that I was familiar with. And you know, now,
Speaker 2: it's like my wife and I were debating about this
Speaker 2: as far as is Casablanca still a very well known movie.
Speaker 2: And I don't know if any of my coworkers who
Speaker 2: are under forty, if they've ever seen this movie, if
Speaker 2: they would get the references. They just don't know. But
Speaker 2: it's funny that the references are still out there in force.
Speaker 2: Like just thinking of every time you start up a
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers movie on able streaming, whatever it's got the
Speaker 2: strains of as time goes by that comes with it.
Speaker 2: But I don't know how many people realize what that's
Speaker 2: from these days. But it was very difficult for me
Speaker 2: making this request and saying, what the hell am I
Speaker 2: going to say about this movie that hasn't been said before.
Speaker 2: I think we had the same thing when we talked
Speaker 2: about Blade Runner quite a few years ago, where it's
Speaker 2: is there anything new we can bring to the table,
Speaker 2: because it's just such a well worn documented film and
Speaker 2: I don't know how many new readings there can be
Speaker 2: of it in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 6: When you talk about younger people maybe not knowing this one,
Speaker 6: I was thinking about this and how this is one
Speaker 6: of the first cult movies in America, the cult following
Speaker 6: at the Bridle Theater in nineteen fifty three in Cambridge.
Speaker 6: That's an art house theater, and it's like something that's
Speaker 6: being shown in like some of the first retrospectives of
Speaker 6: Bogart movies. It's like he's still alive, I think when
Speaker 6: they start doing this, but by the sixties it becomes
Speaker 6: a cult movie, like the kind that we might think
Speaker 6: up in the Cities with Harold and Maud and Altopa
Speaker 6: and Pinklamingo's like Bogart movies were that kind of thing
Speaker 6: on college campuses in the sixties, and I think that
Speaker 6: a lot of people that were part of that cul
Speaker 6: became film critics, and so we grew up with like
Speaker 6: people like Roger Ebert cheerleaders for this movie. So if
Speaker 6: you got into movies as a gen xer or even millennial,
Speaker 6: you probably were reading critics that have referenced this all
Speaker 6: the time, even if you didn't see it. You know
Speaker 6: the dialogue, you know the quotes and the pop cultural references,
Speaker 6: and maybe you grew up with Warner Brothers cartoons that
Speaker 6: were like making reference to it, or the Simpsons making
Speaker 6: reference to it. I think that, yeah, the further out
Speaker 6: we get from it, the more that's going to receive,
Speaker 6: you know. And so yeah, you could be right that
Speaker 6: there's a whole generation that wouldn't know this film, even
Speaker 6: though I think there's several generations that know it really well.
Speaker 6: I think among old Hollywood, I think it's actually had
Speaker 6: better luck than Gone with the Wind or some other
Speaker 6: films that were like inescapable, because there's elements of those
Speaker 6: films that maybe have an aged quite as well, like
Speaker 6: in terms of cultural sensitivity and blanket considering where it's
Speaker 6: set and the time it's made. It's like remarkable, Like
Speaker 6: it's a miracle, Like how unoffensive it is by twenty
Speaker 6: twenty five standards, it's also.
Speaker 2: A miracle, or maybe not a miracle. Maybe sad that
Speaker 2: so many of the issues that it brought up in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty two are still issues today, talking about refugees
Speaker 2: and the refugee problem quote unquote, and just the way
Speaker 2: that we have occupied territories. Just thinking about Resident Volinski
Speaker 2: coming to the White House recently and just what a
Speaker 2: shit show that was. I was like, oh, is this
Speaker 2: If we had visited VC France, would we have gotten
Speaker 2: the same reception back in nineteen forty two.
Speaker 8: Probably The crazy thing about that was seeing it in
Speaker 8: the theater at a revival screening recently, maybe a couple
Speaker 8: of weeks ago. I was in a tiny, little theater
Speaker 8: with only maybe five other people, and there were all men,
Speaker 8: which was strange to say the least. And then afterwards
Speaker 8: one of them told me that he went to school
Speaker 8: with Julius Epstein's granddaughter or something like that. It was
Speaker 8: just strange days. But I forgot how many times they
Speaker 8: bring up in the movie and they say the word
Speaker 8: concentration camp. In nineteen forty two, the term concentration camp
Speaker 8: meant something different from Ashchwitz Bercanal. What happened afterwards. And
Speaker 8: it's funny too, because the Epstein's ended up leaving this
Speaker 8: to work on why we fight with Frank Capra talking
Speaker 8: all about that, but so little has changed about American
Speaker 8: politics and the bugbear of people coming to our shores.
Speaker 8: But I think the reason that it aged so well
Speaker 8: where something like Gone with the Wind perhaps didn't in
Speaker 8: many respects, not even just the racial component, was the
Speaker 8: fact that the people that played foreigners in the film
Speaker 8: were actually foreigners. It's just something that's so rare in Hollywood.
Speaker 8: You watch so many films from Britain and the United States,
Speaker 8: and they have vast swaths of great talent from these countries,
Speaker 8: but they prefer to have their stock character actors play
Speaker 8: them and put a little brown makeup over their face
Speaker 8: and doesn't age well. But Casablanca has it in spades.
Speaker 2: This is probably the first time that I've been able
Speaker 2: to have an episode with two other co hosts where
Speaker 2: we've all been able to see the movie recently in
Speaker 2: a theater, which does not happen very often unless we're
Speaker 2: talking about Captain America, Brave New World or something. But
Speaker 2: to have this movie from forty two still play revival
Speaker 2: houses almost like clockwork, that it is a February fourteen
Speaker 2: Valentine's Day tradition for a lot of revival houses to
Speaker 2: show Casablanca right around that time, and this was no exception.
Speaker 2: There were actually multiple screenings happening in the Detroit area.
Speaker 2: There was, I want to say, either Imagine or one
Speaker 2: of those larger theater chains. We're doing revival screenings throughout
Speaker 2: the week. And then the Redford Theater here in Detroit
Speaker 2: area added on their big screen, and that was just
Speaker 2: a joy to be able to see with so many
Speaker 2: me just pure film fans in such a lavish setting,
Speaker 2: and to hear those lines again and to hear the
Speaker 2: audience just murmuring them as well. And this movie, like
Speaker 2: you already mentioned, it's so quotable, and there's so many
Speaker 2: good lines, and just everyone is saying their favorite ones,
Speaker 2: especially as you get to the end of the film,
Speaker 2: and just those that speech from Humphrey Bogart. There are
Speaker 2: so many lines in there that you've just heard so
Speaker 2: many times. It's wonderful.
Speaker 6: One of my most influential books on me is Danny
Speaker 6: Perry's Cult Movies, and so that was probably the first
Speaker 6: book I read about like that film being a genuine
Speaker 6: cult movie, as far as like people wearing costumes, quoting dialogue,
Speaker 6: back popping Champagne in the theater, the interactivity of it,
Speaker 6: which I think by the time I got to Casa Blank,
Speaker 6: it was one of the classic American films, if not
Speaker 6: the classic Hollywood film, Like how was this in the
Speaker 6: same conversation as a racer?
Speaker 8: Heead?
Speaker 6: But you know, at that time it was actually something
Speaker 6: that could be relied on as an old movie that
Speaker 6: drew a large, passionate, younger audience that was not even
Speaker 6: the audience that saw it in nineteen forty two or
Speaker 6: forty three. Was it Vietnam generation kids, boomers. It's interesting
Speaker 6: that way. I think trying to get my head around
Speaker 6: just the cult side of it was part of the
Speaker 6: fun of prepping for this coming. I was in the
Speaker 6: same boat as you, was, like what do we say
Speaker 6: about this? The amount of material written on. Casablanca is
Speaker 6: so enormous that it's a little intimidated. But I thought
Speaker 6: we would just enter three movie buffs and just talk
Speaker 6: about our feelings with it.
Speaker 8: I believe in us, I know we can't.
Speaker 2: I think I had seen When Harry Met Sally before
Speaker 2: I saw Casablanca. So there's the whole thing in there
Speaker 2: where you see them watching the film when they're younger
Speaker 2: and then watching it again when they're older, and the
Speaker 2: different reactions that they had to that. And Efron she
Speaker 2: was born in forty one, so she is coming to
Speaker 2: this as a middle aged person. As far as the
Speaker 2: script and having that as part of When Harry Met Sally,
Speaker 2: it also really does speak to that whole thing as
Speaker 2: far as how your attitudes change or can change around
Speaker 2: movies as you watch them over the years. And this
Speaker 2: whole thing of Sally talking about how she would definitely
Speaker 2: go off with Victor Las though when she's younger and
Speaker 2: then later on I would never see that. Of course,
Speaker 2: I'm going to go with Humphrey bolk Art. You change
Speaker 2: the movie, stay the same, but your attitude is definitely
Speaker 2: mature over your lifetime.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, I always take a little bit of umbriage with
Speaker 8: the Moniker cult movies, because cult is almost like an
Speaker 8: epithet that you give to something that is not to
Speaker 8: the level of religion. And in my house, basically art
Speaker 8: was our religion. So when you talk about like the
Speaker 8: Bradle Theater, after Bogart died, like a couple months afterward,
Speaker 8: they did the retrospective and then every week they would
Speaker 8: show Casablanca, or even more importantly, they would show it
Speaker 8: during the Finals week, and this is right across Harvard Square,
Speaker 8: and so people who are cramming for the finals, are
Speaker 8: taking tests, they would go to it almost as a
Speaker 8: lease of tension, of pressure, and that religiosity of going
Speaker 8: to the cinema every week of it being just something
Speaker 8: that you do, you go almost to pray. And so
Speaker 8: it's almost like the litany of Casablanca, where you have
Speaker 8: all of those phrases, here's looking at you, kid, pill
Speaker 8: of beans, all that kind of stuff. And so when
Speaker 8: it happens, and it's such a short movie too, that
Speaker 8: you can just recite it all within your heart while
Speaker 8: you watch it with a bevy of other people, and
Speaker 8: it becomes basically a religion and you carry it with
Speaker 8: you wherever you go.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I was thinking also just about how this kind
Speaker 6: of establishes beyond the Maltese falcon. It softens the Bogart
Speaker 6: persona that makes it the most ingratiating version of that tough.
Speaker 2: Guy part of his career.
Speaker 6: As far as I mean, I think that Bogart is
Speaker 6: a big part of why Casablanca had that second life.
Speaker 6: Is like the attraction to his persona I think was
Speaker 6: something that really was kind of well served by this film.
Speaker 6: But I think even in the sixties, I mean, you
Speaker 6: have things like The Guard's Breathless that are also referencing
Speaker 6: Boguard and all the things that come about in the
Speaker 6: seventies that we might talk about play it against Sam
Speaker 6: or the man with Boguard's it's the mystique of that actor,
Speaker 6: you know, Die Mung. But I think maybe that just
Speaker 6: that kind of sarcastic, slightly anti hero ish persona I
Speaker 6: think sets him apart from John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart
Speaker 6: some of the other people that might have even played
Speaker 6: darker characters than you know, what they're known for. But
Speaker 6: I think they didn't have the same I don't know,
Speaker 6: like the attitude or street crib that Bogart seemed to
Speaker 6: carry through multiple generations. And it's interesting because it's maybe
Speaker 6: one of the saddest characters in some that you really get,
Speaker 6: like he's almost never in danger, but it's a film
Speaker 6: that really shows him at his most defeated. If it
Speaker 6: softens the play and like the alcoholism and the harsher
Speaker 6: side of it's a more palatable version of that character,
Speaker 6: but it's still for that to be like just the
Speaker 6: embodiment of like confident macho lagger. There's a lot of
Speaker 6: chinks in the art for that character throughout the running time.
Speaker 6: I think he's such a.
Speaker 2: Dynamic character that he starts off with this whole I
Speaker 2: stick my neck up for no one. I don't let
Speaker 2: people drink with me, nobody joins me at my table,
Speaker 2: I don't share drink with anybody in this bar, and
Speaker 2: just the way that he eventually starts to soften, and
Speaker 2: then we see why he was so hard. We see
Speaker 2: that flashback. We get to see him as this joyous character,
Speaker 2: loving life, let's get married and all this to ilsa
Speaker 2: and then we come back to him come crashing back
Speaker 2: down with those final strains of as time goes by,
Speaker 2: as we see him just drinking there in the dark
Speaker 2: with Seam playing the piano, and we never really get
Speaker 2: his backstory. We get versions of it. We get Renault,
Speaker 2: the claud Raine's character, saying, oh, I thought it might
Speaker 2: be something like this, or even Strasser. He gives a
Speaker 2: little we have a dossier on you, and he starts
Speaker 2: to read some things, but you don't get a ton
Speaker 2: You get a few facts about him, that he fought
Speaker 2: in the Spanish Revolution, and you get to find out
Speaker 2: that he fought on the right side, which is funny
Speaker 2: because in the Big Sleep, I think they talk about
Speaker 2: how he and Sean are not sewn archer. I can't
Speaker 2: remember the character's name, but that they were.
Speaker 9: He used to swap shots between drinks and drinks between shots,
Speaker 9: whichever you like.
Speaker 1: Mary respeks to you, sir, few men ever swapped more
Speaker 1: than one shot with Sean Reagan.
Speaker 2: And you get a few other things about Rick, but
Speaker 2: you don't really get how he came to Casablanca, other
Speaker 2: than for the waters, which is probably my favorite line
Speaker 2: of the film.
Speaker 1: What in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Speaker 7: My health?
Speaker 9: I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Speaker 1: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert?
Speaker 7: I was misinformed.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, I love that. That was probably one of the
Speaker 8: biggest laughs in my theater, my small theater this time
Speaker 8: around you and the five other guys O the size
Speaker 8: of course shocked, shocked to find there's gambling here. That
Speaker 8: one's the other big one that probably has to be
Speaker 8: my favorite. So you were talking about how soft Bogart
Speaker 8: is in this, and it's funny because he has a
Speaker 8: little pithy remark where he said, I was at Warner's
Speaker 8: under a contract. It was like the seventh year of
Speaker 8: my contract. For six years, I've been playing the same character,
Speaker 8: and every single one of these movies of this just heavy,
Speaker 8: vaguely ethnic with some kind of pithy nickname, and he
Speaker 8: would just be mean and usually get shot by the
Speaker 8: end of the movie. But then the decided Warner Is
Speaker 8: the PR department said, Okay, we need to boost him
Speaker 8: to major stardom, so we need to focus our energy
Speaker 8: on making him a romantic lead, to which he responded,
Speaker 8: I did the exact same thing in Casablanca. The only
Speaker 8: difference was it was Ingrid Bergmann looking at me, so
Speaker 8: everybody thought I was this great romantic lead because she's
Speaker 8: so beautiful, so luminous, and the way they photograph her
Speaker 8: and this is just spectacular.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, she looks amazing in this. And she also
Speaker 2: is such a great character that she knows she lies
Speaker 2: to Rick, or let's say, she hides the truth as
Speaker 2: far as what her past is, and this whole thing
Speaker 2: that they have where it's like no questions and that
Speaker 2: doesn't even it's not even like upfront, but you get
Speaker 2: this whole thing where he starts to ask her more
Speaker 2: things and he's, oh, yeah, I remember, no questions, and yeah.
Speaker 2: They have this relationship where she cannot reveal her past,
Speaker 2: really doesn't want to reveal her past, doesn't want to
Speaker 2: live through that hurt again. And then once she finds
Speaker 2: out what is actually happening with her husband, with who
Speaker 2: she thought was dead, that she then has this huge struggle.
Speaker 2: I almost wish we could see this from else's point
Speaker 2: of view, the struggle that she has to leave Rick
Speaker 2: and to leave him standing on that platform with the
Speaker 2: world the elements crying onto that letter, like doing to
Speaker 2: that letter what he couldn't do, but erasing it with
Speaker 2: the tears of the world. I just oh, it's so great.
Speaker 2: And that she comes back the way she tries to
Speaker 2: play against Rick, the way that she tries to seduce
Speaker 2: Rick at one point, and just that whole back and
Speaker 2: forth between them. And then you've got Laslo there, who
Speaker 2: thinks he knows what's going on, but he's probably the
Speaker 2: most clueless character in this movie.
Speaker 6: All the mystery of that character is also partly, i think,
Speaker 6: because they couldn't tell the story as it is in
Speaker 6: the production code reasons, and so by carving away the backstory,
Speaker 6: they leave so much more that you can fill in
Speaker 6: with your imagination as far me you know, because in
Speaker 6: the play, he's a lawyer that's got these ideals. He's
Speaker 6: got a family, like he's got a wife, and it's
Speaker 6: a different character than all we know about him is
Speaker 6: just that he had these politically righteous kind of moments
Speaker 6: in his past, but that he's at a point that
Speaker 6: he's neutral and defeated because of this relationship. It just
Speaker 6: as a film about stepping out of that neutrality and
Speaker 6: taking as a very simple political It's rooted in a
Speaker 6: specific war, specific time, but part of the way is
Speaker 6: carried food like multiple generations, I think, is because could
Speaker 6: be applied to so many situations. It is general, and
Speaker 6: it also it's funny it's a funny movie, and it's
Speaker 6: a great romantic film. So it is a political film,
Speaker 6: but all the other elements are working in such harmony
Speaker 6: with it that it doesn't feel didactic in any way,
Speaker 6: even though, which because I think when I look at
Speaker 6: some of the other films that kind of come in
Speaker 6: the wake of it, they tend to foreground the politics first.
Speaker 6: And then it's also nice that they have romance and humor,
Speaker 6: but their political films first. Where's Casablanca. I think Michael
Speaker 6: Curtiz really sought as a romance, It just happens to
Speaker 6: be political, whereas I think the other ones, maybe because
Speaker 6: we're further into the war or whatever reason, it's just
Speaker 6: a different sensibility and they become much more good propaganda films,
Speaker 6: but propaganda films.
Speaker 2: Federico, you mentioned the immigrant cast, and I totally agree
Speaker 2: with you that that really makes a huge difference to
Speaker 2: see all these very authentic looking people, even when they're
Speaker 2: looking up at the plane that's coming by that ultimately
Speaker 2: is carrying major Strasser, but they're looking up at this
Speaker 2: plane like that could be us. Someday we could be
Speaker 2: on that plane. We could be go to Lisbon and
Speaker 2: then to the United States, and then all of the voices,
Speaker 2: the language that you hear inside of the actual cafe,
Speaker 2: and then some of those amazing character actors. This whole
Speaker 2: movie is populated with just some of the best faces,
Speaker 2: some that we've called out before on the show. I
Speaker 2: think at least two of the people that work at
Speaker 2: the bar, between the Professor and Sasha, were both in
Speaker 2: Ball of Fire, which is just populated with great character
Speaker 2: actor faces. Of course, Sidney green Street and Peter Lorie
Speaker 2: had just started with Humphrey Bogarth the year before in
Speaker 2: Malti's Falcon, and then those three would continue on to
Speaker 2: work in quite a few things, and even had Mary
Speaker 2: Astor know Peter Lourie unfortunately in Across the Pacific, so
Speaker 2: a different type of war film that we had a
Speaker 2: few years after that, I believe. But yeah, it was
Speaker 2: just those those amazing faces, those amazing accents that they have,
Speaker 2: and then the level of humor, just the little things
Speaker 2: like Carl bringing the extra glass with him because he
Speaker 2: thinks that somebody's gonna ask him to have a drink,
Speaker 2: as well as the better brandy because he wants to
Speaker 2: drink that, or the whole thing was Sasha where he's
Speaker 2: being sent to take yvon Holm and then it's like
Speaker 2: and then come straight back. It's like, ah, all right,
Speaker 2: I will like you can tell that he's been bad
Speaker 2: in the past, and Rick knows that enough to admonish
Speaker 2: him before he even screws up anything.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The Kinsky, the bartender who plays Sasha the Russian of
Speaker 8: the film. His big major Hollywood debut was Trouble in
Speaker 8: Paradise by Lubitsch. And the most amazing thing I learned
Speaker 8: doing research for this was that Paul henryed. They originally
Speaker 8: wanted Philip Dorn, who was under contract at Warner's, but
Speaker 8: he was already in Random Harvest so they couldn't pull
Speaker 8: him from that production. So they decided, okay, we'll get
Speaker 8: a real like European foreigner, probably Eastern or Central European.
Speaker 8: But if Henry turned it down, which they knew he
Speaker 8: was going to, because the script they sent him was
Speaker 8: just terrible before they bumped him up and gave him
Speaker 8: third starting credit, We're going to ask, of all people,
Speaker 8: Herbert Marshall, and we talk about great supporting casts. And
Speaker 8: this has basically almost everybody from the Warner Brothers like
Speaker 8: Stock Company except for Alan Hale Senior, which would have
Speaker 8: been just incredible to have. But the idea of Herbert
Speaker 8: Marshall as the Victor Laslow character, I think would have
Speaker 8: added a totally different dimension to this. And there's a
Speaker 8: lot of criticism that comes at Henry for his portrayal
Speaker 8: in it, no more than of course Roger Ebert, who
Speaker 8: had a lot of vitriol for what he perceived to
Speaker 8: be his lackluster acting throughout the film.
Speaker 2: If it had been Herbert Marshall, I might have gone
Speaker 2: away with Victor Laslow as well. And that's even worried
Speaker 2: about Vitrick Blaine. But because Marshall was so great, unless
Speaker 2: he was wearing a goateee, because we can't have him
Speaker 2: with facial hair.
Speaker 1: I certainly it wouldn't wear a beer either.
Speaker 10: What well, I wouldn't or you wouldn't.
Speaker 11: I noted any of my business, but if I didn't
Speaker 11: have anything to hide, I certainly wouldn't appeared.
Speaker 6: When you talk about the real life emigres in the
Speaker 6: cast and the famous La Marseille is singing scene, and
Speaker 6: the fact that so many people in that scene, this
Speaker 6: is part of the legend of it, were real life
Speaker 6: exopats fleeing Nazi persecution gives it almost a documentary quality
Speaker 6: to it because those are real people who's real tears.
Speaker 6: That's capturing something more than just movie characters, like that's
Speaker 6: crossing the line into something else. And I was thinking
Speaker 6: about the international component of it, because part of what
Speaker 6: I love about Casablanca is how new York it feels
Speaker 6: for a film that's said in Africa, it's a film
Speaker 6: that reminds me of New York more than anything else
Speaker 6: because of the references to New York. I know that
Speaker 6: when it opened in New York and Bogart has the
Speaker 6: line about there's certain parts of New York City that
Speaker 6: I wouldn't recommend you try to invade that would generate
Speaker 6: cheers from the audience when that opened in nineteen forty two.
Speaker 6: And I just think about how Scarface inspired Pepula Moco.
Speaker 6: Pepula Moco becomes remade as Algiers. Algiers becomes definitely something
Speaker 6: they have in mind when did they acquire everybody comes
Speaker 6: to rix. Casablanca then inspires people like Jean de Godard,
Speaker 6: who look at these casts and all these great faces
Speaker 6: and all those new wave guys are looking at Claude
Speaker 6: Rains and Peter Lori and Sydney green Street, like we
Speaker 6: needed faces like this in our movies, Like in that
Speaker 6: international conversation that these films were having. I find so
Speaker 6: interesting even though it's yes as American's any film I
Speaker 6: can think of, but it has this international kind of
Speaker 6: mixture in the cast and the production, like behind the
Speaker 6: scenes Michael Curtiz, But it's an interesting dialogue. I don't know,
Speaker 6: you really have the same thing happening with Hollywood hits
Speaker 6: today that feel that influenced by world cinema and give
Speaker 6: back in the same way.
Speaker 2: I completely agree, And yeah, to hear how this movie
Speaker 2: traveled around the world and when it played and how
Speaker 2: it played, and just said it was of course in
Speaker 2: Germany for many years, and then when it did finally play,
Speaker 2: it was not the rape version of it. Just that
Speaker 2: it took forever for people to actually be able to
Speaker 2: see this movie in totality. And it's remarkable to me
Speaker 2: that it even plays in totality in the US, just
Speaker 2: because the way that it skirts some of these rules
Speaker 2: from the censors, just that the Claude Raine's character is
Speaker 2: freaking incredible. Some of those lines like oh there's another
Speaker 2: visa problem, oh, show her in. There's no subterfuge right
Speaker 2: there at all. And it's like the only question I
Speaker 2: have as far as like, did he sleep with the
Speaker 2: Bulgarian girl or did he not sleep with her? I'm
Speaker 2: not exactly sure. I know that she talks about how
Speaker 2: her husband's still just a boy and that she needs
Speaker 2: to protect him, and I'm like, I think she might
Speaker 2: have ended up sleeping with her in now in order
Speaker 2: to try to get these visas. I don't know what
Speaker 2: you guys think.
Speaker 6: I always interpreted it as that the money was preventing
Speaker 6: that from happening. That basically it was implied that she
Speaker 6: was going to pay with sex for the visas. But
Speaker 6: because the game is fixed with the gambling, he's able
Speaker 6: to come up with the money. And this is why
Speaker 6: Renault is a little bit miffed at him.
Speaker 2: You're right, yeah, I'll be coming by with the beautiful blonde.
Speaker 2: Make sure she doesn't lend.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: That's also softened from the play because in the play,
Speaker 6: though that the Bulgarian couple is much more central to
Speaker 6: the plot and Renault is a lot more upset about it.
Speaker 6: It becomes much more of a plot point than in
Speaker 6: this It's a much briefer kind of situation. In a way,
Speaker 6: it's almost like there's multiple versions of the couple trying
Speaker 6: to get out of town, because you have the Bulgarian
Speaker 6: couple and you also have older couples that are just
Speaker 6: trying to get their English down. It's like different versions
Speaker 6: of the same idea, of different stages of life trying
Speaker 6: to escape that town. The Bulgarian couple is more central
Speaker 6: to the play, and it's darker because the Renault character
Speaker 6: is trying to get her to drink more. It's a
Speaker 6: little bit more aggressive, a little more creepy than what
Speaker 6: Claude Rains ultimately plays.
Speaker 2: That scene in the casino with the roulette, that's the
Speaker 2: moment for me. That's the moment where you get to
Speaker 2: see Rick's true colors, that he actually helps out these people.
Speaker 2: He has no reason to at all other than just
Speaker 2: because of the heartfelt sentiment that she brings to him.
Speaker 2: And I loved the way that that plays out. I
Speaker 2: think it is just absolutely wonderful to see that and
Speaker 2: that is just two spins of the roulette wheel and
Speaker 2: he's able to a for this couple's visas to get
Speaker 2: the hell out of town. I just I think that's
Speaker 2: the moment where you realize what a knight in shining
Speaker 2: arm or this guy secretly is.
Speaker 8: I always cry well, yeah, Kinski comes from behind the
Speaker 8: bar and starts he's talking to Carl. Carl like is
Speaker 8: so excited finally that his friend and his basically his
Speaker 8: boss has grown a heart that he tells Sasha, and
Speaker 8: Sasha starts like yelling in Russian and he comes over
Speaker 8: and kisses him and he's like, get your paws off me,
Speaker 8: you crazy Russian. Because it is that moment, and it's
Speaker 8: incredible to me too, because I'm pretty sure it's Julius
Speaker 8: Epstein said he based that whole Roulette thing off of
Speaker 8: a story of somebody that he knew who played roulette
Speaker 8: in Las Vegas, who worked in La and they said,
Speaker 8: put the number there, and they knew it was rigged.
Speaker 8: It was like a mob joint and they say, Okay,
Speaker 8: you won today, but you're never coming back here ever again.
Speaker 8: And I just wanted to come back to the thing
Speaker 8: that you guys talked about, the ethereality of Rick's backstory
Speaker 8: of talking about the Epstein's in the way that they wrote,
Speaker 8: how they're responsible for most of the humor in it.
Speaker 8: But they very consciously decided not to go into the backstory.
Speaker 8: And like classic Hollywood has that tendency it can be didactic,
Speaker 8: overly didactic, but like this movie and just the way
Speaker 8: it tells Rick's backstory is just so open and ended.
Speaker 8: And I'm sure we'll get into it later with all
Speaker 8: of the supplementary material and all of the quasi sequels
Speaker 8: that people have tried to make, but it's just it's
Speaker 8: just ruining the mistique of it, all of him as
Speaker 8: a character.
Speaker 2: And you talked about the Marseillas scene with the people crying,
Speaker 2: and I'm right there with them every single time. I
Speaker 2: am a sucker for that scene when the orchestra comes in,
Speaker 2: and I love that. Albie Wallace, I think it was
Speaker 2: Helbi Wallace was the one that was just like, I
Speaker 2: don't care that it's only this many people on screen.
Speaker 2: We're going to have a full orchestra. It might have
Speaker 2: been Jack Warner himself actually that gave that piece of
Speaker 2: advice when it came to the editing of the film,
Speaker 2: just to bring that orchestra in, bring it so loud
Speaker 2: and so powerful, and the way that everyone is joining
Speaker 2: in there, and especially that shot of Yvonne so Vane's
Speaker 2: a very interesting character for me. Where she starts off
Speaker 2: the girlfriend of Rick. She's drinking too much, he tells
Speaker 2: us to take her home, and then the next time
Speaker 2: we see her she's on the arm of a German officer,
Speaker 2: and that whole thing where people are saying stuff to
Speaker 2: her in her native language. And I love too that
Speaker 2: this movie is not subtitled whatsoever. We just have to
Speaker 2: pick up everything through context clues unless you happen to
Speaker 2: speak you know, French, German, et cetera. And that when
Speaker 2: she is the one who's standing there singing the Marseillas
Speaker 2: and the tears are coming down her eyes, You're just like, Okay,
Speaker 2: she's probably not going to be going home with that
Speaker 2: German tonight and making the right decision. And I just
Speaker 2: love the lady with the guitar and how she's chiming
Speaker 2: in the whole room, going wild at that moment, and
Speaker 2: just that unity, and you feel like it's such a
Speaker 2: magical thing. And it just even though it's a movie,
Speaker 2: and even though it was so pre planned and everything,
Speaker 2: it just feels so organic to the story. And again,
Speaker 2: I also love that whole way that it's put together
Speaker 2: through the editing and just that little look of the
Speaker 2: orchestra to Bogart and Bogart given that little nod, and
Speaker 2: then they're able to start playing along with what Victor
Speaker 2: Laslow wants them to do, and it just turns into magic.
Speaker 6: Yeah, for a quote unquote war movie. It's the only
Speaker 6: battle scene, but it's a musical battle scene. That's what
Speaker 6: makes it kind of stirring. And yeah, I also will
Speaker 6: join the Yeah, I cry in this whole sequence of
Speaker 6: the film as well, because it's the scene of him
Speaker 6: being generous with the Bulgarian couple followed by the Marseilles
Speaker 6: kind of seems so back to back, like these moments
Speaker 6: of generosity of spirit, which I think as you get older,
Speaker 6: it's like not really romantic tragedy or death of characters
Speaker 6: who liked it gets you in the heart strength. It's
Speaker 6: like those moments of people being decent because you don't
Speaker 6: have a lot of reminders of that.
Speaker 2: And the other thing about that is you're talking about
Speaker 2: it was this scene, then this scene. This movie moves
Speaker 2: along so quickly and there are no dead scenes to it.
Speaker 2: There's nothing where I'm just like, oh, yes, this scene,
Speaker 2: I guess I'll go use the bathroom. There's none of that.
Speaker 2: Everything adds to the next thing, and everything has a
Speaker 2: purpose in this movie. There's no moments where I'm just like,
Speaker 2: oh boy, we could have done without that, And little
Speaker 2: things like how we see Garti being trapped and arrested
Speaker 2: and then we just hear about him later on, and
Speaker 2: when you hear about him, it just hits you right
Speaker 2: in the heart. Even though we didn't see the guy die,
Speaker 2: I didn't need to see the guy there. There are
Speaker 2: a lot of things that happen off screen where I well,
Speaker 2: we don't get to be privy to that. But that's okay.
Speaker 2: Most of the time I'm complaining about the whole show.
Speaker 2: Don't tell things like, oh, you should have shown no
Speaker 2: Guarty being killed. No, no, it was absolutely perfect the
Speaker 2: way that we just get that little piece of information
Speaker 2: and that wonderful line from again Claude rains I'm trying
Speaker 2: to decide if he was killed trying to escape or
Speaker 2: if he died by suicide. I'm like, oh man, it's
Speaker 2: just so.
Speaker 8: Callous every time that happens. Though, the problem is I'm
Speaker 8: the only one laughing in the theme.
Speaker 2: I laugh as well because mayn Claude Rains is fucking
Speaker 2: phenomenal in this movie.
Speaker 8: No Claude Rains like for me, there's two like you've
Speaker 8: got Ingrid Bergman. Without her, this fear would not work
Speaker 8: or it wouldn't reach the heights that it was because
Speaker 8: I think, Bill, you brought up Peppolelimoco and Algiers and
Speaker 8: the connection is they wanted heavy lamar. She's got that luminosity.
Speaker 8: She's absolutely gorgeous, but she doesn't have the earthiness that
Speaker 8: Ingrid Bergmann has. And Bergmann like, years and years afterwards,
Speaker 8: she was actually watching herself on screen and she said,
Speaker 8: I look like a milkmaid. I just look. I'm not
Speaker 8: that perfect type. And that's the beauty of it is
Speaker 8: there are so many scenes in rewatching it where somebody
Speaker 8: else is talking, but it's just Bergmann on screen and
Speaker 8: they have that incredible like what is it like twenty
Speaker 8: three twenty four second long take of her just listening
Speaker 8: to a song like that just doesn't happen anymore where
Speaker 8: you have that much time. But the other twin gun
Speaker 8: is just Rains, Like Rains is the lynchpin in terms
Speaker 8: of the comedy and how fast everything is because he
Speaker 8: was a machine and he worked with Kurtiz so much.
Speaker 8: They made eleven films together out of like fifty six
Speaker 8: that he made overall, like some like basically a fifth
Speaker 8: of everything that he made. And he was the one
Speaker 8: that always knew his lines, and they would play tricks
Speaker 8: with him all the time. He would be horribly, horribly
Speaker 8: anxious about not knowing his lines. So Peter Laurie, the
Speaker 8: ultimate prankster, decided one day get everybody to prepare for
Speaker 8: a scene. And then of course they started the scene
Speaker 8: and he looks over at Laurie and he's like, oh,
Speaker 8: something wrong, Peter, I don't know all these lines. And
Speaker 8: they just crack up laughing.
Speaker 2: Oh God, Laurie. You guys know, and anybody that listens
Speaker 2: to the show knows. I cannot say enough nice things
Speaker 2: about Laurie. And he's in here for just two scenes
Speaker 2: and just steals the show the way that he moves
Speaker 2: his face. He plays his instrument so well, and you
Speaker 2: just get to see those little and I always talk
Speaker 2: about that when he raises his eyebrows and his whole
Speaker 2: forehead will move, and just those little things where he's
Speaker 2: just you despise me, don't truck. I just love that
Speaker 2: whole thing that he's doing there.
Speaker 8: If I ever thought about you, I would the.
Speaker 2: Way that he is trying to get Rick's approval and
Speaker 2: just this whole like, oh have you heard about these
Speaker 2: German couriers? And when they find out or when Rick
Speaker 2: finds out that it was probably Garty who might have
Speaker 2: killed these guys, is like, oh, I underestimated you, like
Speaker 2: you've just gone up in my book. And I think
Speaker 2: Hugardi really gets off on that. I think he's very
Speaker 2: much wants to not be despised by Rick.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I could never tell with that line if he was.
Speaker 6: When he says that he's impressed by him. Is he
Speaker 6: happy that he's killed Nazis or is he judging him
Speaker 6: for being that ruthless and trying to get something to
Speaker 6: sell that he's murdering people for it, Like, it's unclear
Speaker 6: to me which I like that. I could read it
Speaker 6: either way. But I think that in the play again,
Speaker 6: it's like it has that line tell Rick that even
Speaker 6: a pimp can die like a man and commit suicide,
Speaker 6: like that character's ennobled in the play in a way
Speaker 6: that Peter Laurie just plays it as desperate and sinister,
Speaker 6: just because that's what he's that's his gift. But I
Speaker 6: think that as a kid, he was the star of
Speaker 6: the movie for me because he was like I knew
Speaker 6: him from cartoons and things like, and he just seemed
Speaker 6: like so exaggerated in his that Rick Rick hide me
Speaker 6: like that was the That was the movie to me
Speaker 6: for when I was a little kid. It's just that scene,
Speaker 6: and it's easy to forget that he's only in, like
Speaker 6: you're saying, the two scenes, whereas like Paul en Reid
Speaker 6: is like is the third billing? But I don't. I
Speaker 6: think of Claude Rains, and I think of Peter Laurie.
Speaker 6: I think I've Sidney Greenster, I think of like Conrad Vit,
Speaker 6: like all these great character actors as like the real
Speaker 6: stars to me. Over han Reed, I think he's just
Speaker 6: when you talk about like Ebert's criticism of that character,
Speaker 6: I think it's just maybe just that that character is
Speaker 6: unrelatably perfect and noble in a way that we don't
Speaker 6: see ourselves in him, like he he needs to be that,
Speaker 6: and it makes it harder to judge Ingrid Bergmann for
Speaker 6: going with him versus like Ivia he was as equally
Speaker 6: flawed as Rick. But I think that we all see
Speaker 6: ourselves in Rick, whereas we don't see ourselves in in Laslow.
Speaker 6: But he's necessary for the story. But yeah, all the
Speaker 6: colorful supporting characters I think are part of the joy
Speaker 6: of that movie for sure.
Speaker 2: I think it's also very smart the way that they
Speaker 2: shoot Reins when he's with the Nazis, and that difference
Speaker 2: between him and kybrant Fit, and just that he's dwarfed
Speaker 2: by all of the Nazis and you get to see that,
Speaker 2: especially when he's sitting at their table, and how they're
Speaker 2: all taller than him, and even when he greets him
Speaker 2: at the airport and Wight is to his right and
Speaker 2: he's walking there and you just see that major height
Speaker 2: difference between them. He's just this little officious guy. I know.
Speaker 2: There's one other Nazi the I can't remember the character's name,
Speaker 2: but he's Heinrich. Yeah, fatter, shorter, with the mustache. But
Speaker 2: he just seems like, I don't know, he reminds me
Speaker 2: a Toath from the Raiders of the Lost Arc. It's
Speaker 2: just like, yeah, that guy doesn't look like much, but
Speaker 2: he's probably very, very evil, And probably just the name
Speaker 2: Heinrich doesn't help either.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's a little bit of like a blending of
Speaker 8: names where you associate them the same thing with Strasser,
Speaker 8: because Strusser was an actual Nazi that was purged during
Speaker 8: the Night of the Long Knives. And that's what I
Speaker 8: always go back to. And there's a few like political
Speaker 8: articles talking about the background of Casablanca and the ramifications
Speaker 8: of it. But yeah, the thing with heights in this movie,
Speaker 8: like the dynamic of men and women and men with
Speaker 8: other men, especially like Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogert. The
Speaker 8: famous thing is, of course that Humphrey Bogert had to
Speaker 8: wear three inch lifts for this film to deal with
Speaker 8: the five foot nine in ingru Bergmann, which five foot
Speaker 8: nine doesn't sound that tall, but Humphrey Berger was this diminutive,
Speaker 8: like I have to admit that he's a kind of
Speaker 8: weird looking guy for the romantic lead or a classically
Speaker 8: he's now Gary Cooper, is what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 8: But that height difference that they play with, well, you
Speaker 8: brought up earlier the tears and the rain at the
Speaker 8: train station with a note, and I read Allen kde
Speaker 8: Rhodes biography of Critiz, and like the major thing in
Speaker 8: terms of Casablanca and then I think we'll probably maybe
Speaker 8: talk about Passage to Marseille afterwards. Was that because of
Speaker 8: his lack of understanding of the English language, he really
Speaker 8: couldn't deal with writers that well. Like I don't want
Speaker 8: to say that he was terrible at the English language,
Speaker 8: but he just couldn't communicate as well as he could
Speaker 8: in Hungarian in his native tongue. So he primarily focused
Speaker 8: on visuals, and so that's why you get those incredible shots. Famously,
Speaker 8: he was the one that came up with the Vshi
Speaker 8: water at the end of Having Reins. Curtis is just
Speaker 8: this incredible visual storyteller. Where the one shot that really
Speaker 8: stood out to me this time was when we actually
Speaker 8: enter Risk for the first time. We're almost like this
Speaker 8: ghostly presence outside of the door and then we are
Speaker 8: invited through this floating camera. And there are so many
Speaker 8: push ins and dollies in this film, especially layered with crossfades,
Speaker 8: that that's like part of the construction. It's not just
Speaker 8: that the script itself is firing on all cylinders and
Speaker 8: it's fantastic, it's also the visual linking everything together.
Speaker 2: Some of those pushings are just incredible, and some of
Speaker 2: them are pretty subtle, and then you get towards where
Speaker 2: he's drinking alone, and you get that really nice push
Speaker 2: in that's on him. And I want to say that
Speaker 2: it's is there a push in when they go to
Speaker 2: the flashback that will always have Paris flashback.
Speaker 8: With a rise in the music, you know, with the
Speaker 8: Steiner music, that's like the big dig in the knife.
Speaker 8: Here we go, Oh, we're actually going to get into
Speaker 8: the backstory.
Speaker 2: That Steiner score is just so great, the way that
Speaker 2: he plays with as time goes by, the Marseilles and
Speaker 2: then the German national anthem, the Deutsch lenober Ales, and
Speaker 2: you get those just little snatches of those throughout the
Speaker 2: whole thing, and like just to use the d as
Speaker 2: like something bad is about to happen, or we're setting
Speaker 2: the mood here that things are not right in Casablanca.
Speaker 2: I just really thought that he used those different motifs
Speaker 2: so well. And then you have the music that isn't
Speaker 2: related to those three other pieces of music, and those
Speaker 2: work wonderfully too.
Speaker 6: Before I forget, Heines is the other Naze not Heinrich
Speaker 6: by the similar name, like Heine's the ketchup, Yeah, like
Speaker 6: hands the ketchup and.
Speaker 2: If Humphrey Bogart was five six, how tall was Peter
Speaker 2: Laurie because he howers over Peter Laurie every single time
Speaker 2: they're on stage.
Speaker 8: Oh, Peter Laurie is like diminutive. I want to say
Speaker 8: five foot two maybe, but then of course you get
Speaker 8: into the camera angles.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely five foot three, five foot three.
Speaker 12: Ah.
Speaker 8: I was off by one inch.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're close.
Speaker 2: I guess a few inches makes all the difference, That's
Speaker 2: what she said.
Speaker 6: I was thinking about the music, and of course as
Speaker 6: time goes by and thinking about like memory, because one
Speaker 6: thing I was thinking about with this film is just
Speaker 6: that it has that built a nostalgia component just from
Speaker 6: the outset, with like you must remember this as the
Speaker 6: opening line, and that kind of holding on to some
Speaker 6: romanticized version of the past, which is something that you
Speaker 6: also have in Papularmcnalgae is like that kind of romantic
Speaker 6: view of Paris as this thing to escape to, this
Speaker 6: thing that you can't get back to. But you know,
Speaker 6: just as you get further out from Casablanca itself, it
Speaker 6: becomes increasingly like this nostalgia item as far as embodying,
Speaker 6: not just romanticizing like the pre invasion period, but romanticizing
Speaker 6: the forties and forties movies, and like it becomes this
Speaker 6: kind of totem of everything that we lost. Culture evolves
Speaker 6: and it becomes this perfect version of what we think
Speaker 6: the forties was. I was thinking about that, like watching
Speaker 6: if we talk about things like Played against Sam where
Speaker 6: the man with Bogart's face, Like what how this becomes
Speaker 6: this totem. But yeah, it's built into the original film
Speaker 6: itself as far as that melancholy nostalgia element of it,
Speaker 6: which is interesting how it becomes kind of part of
Speaker 6: the reputation of the film itself, but it's built into
Speaker 6: the narrative.
Speaker 8: Even before the making of the film. Like Murray Burnett
Speaker 8: writing the script, he was nostalgic of a time when
Speaker 8: he went to I think it was yeah, and he
Speaker 8: was in his dorm and he would listen to the
Speaker 8: disc in the thirties of as Time Goes By, like
Speaker 8: he that's why he put in the play. You know,
Speaker 8: this whole entire film is just steeped with nostalgia and
Speaker 8: like aching pain and loss and like you talk about
Speaker 8: Pepelamocho and Algiers where you know you're stuck in North
Speaker 8: Africa and you want to get back to in those
Speaker 8: cases France, but in Casablanca he just presumably he wants
Speaker 8: to get back to America and he can't escape. The
Speaker 8: one that I always go back to specifically with that
Speaker 8: is Wages of Fear, where they also have that thing
Speaker 8: of being stuck in South America but wanting to get
Speaker 8: back to quote unquote civilization. And there's that also, like
Speaker 8: that really strange kind of racial aspect to like Pepelamocha,
Speaker 8: where he's like basically losing his mind because of all
Speaker 8: the noise and the foreignness of it, and he wants
Speaker 8: to get back to the familiarity. They don't play with
Speaker 8: that too much in this I guess he decides to
Speaker 8: go out into the hindul In and join the Free
Speaker 8: French and fight in Europe. But there is that aching
Speaker 8: pain at the heart of it all, and that's classic
Speaker 8: Hollywood sell that to everybody.
Speaker 2: When they sing too you're talking about the way that
Speaker 2: Gone with the Wind plays a little different. Now, there's
Speaker 2: not a lot of if any racism in this movie. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Ingrid Bergmann calls Sam boy at one point, just like
Speaker 2: who's the boy on the piano. There's a little questionable there.
Speaker 2: But you've got all of these Arabic people, all these
Speaker 2: I would assume Islamic worshippers here, and you've got people
Speaker 2: from all different areas coming in and you see them
Speaker 2: all in the audience and they're all singing along to
Speaker 2: Sam and as piano. You've got Asians, Europeans, Americans, people
Speaker 2: all different racist countries, colors and creeds all in here,
Speaker 2: and nobody is getting into battles about who's right, who's wrong.
Speaker 2: You've got Nazis and you've got everybody else. You've got
Speaker 2: the Vshi in there as well. At heart that Renault
Speaker 2: eventually is going to come around and do the right
Speaker 2: thing too. But I like that they have that, and
Speaker 2: I love that Sam is such a friend to Rick.
Speaker 2: He is probably the best friend that Rick will ever
Speaker 2: have in his entire life. And those things where he's
Speaker 2: like trying to protect Rick from Elsa, the way that
Speaker 2: he's like, oh no, he went home early, and just
Speaker 2: lying to her through that, and then when he comes
Speaker 2: back and sees Rick and he's just like, come on,
Speaker 2: let's get out of here, let's go get drunk, let's
Speaker 2: go fishing. Trying to get him away from this whole situation.
Speaker 2: I love Sam and I think he's such a great
Speaker 2: character and such an unusual character for a nineteen forty
Speaker 2: two film. The other line, besides the more unfortunate boy
Speaker 2: that references race is I don't sell human beings right,
Speaker 2: which you know. And also he makes the case for
Speaker 2: make sure he gets like twenty twenty percent of the
Speaker 2: door or whatever, he gets paid like a proper star attraction.
Speaker 2: When he sells the club to Sydney Green Street. He's
Speaker 2: looking out for him to not only be moved over
Speaker 2: like an indentured servant. No, he's your star entertainer. You
Speaker 2: pay him correctly.
Speaker 6: When I think about films of the forties, I think
Speaker 6: like val Lewton, and there's only a handful of people
Speaker 6: I think of that, like, they seem to be a
Speaker 6: little bit more progressive on race than unfortunately a lot
Speaker 6: of what you have to forgive a lot when you
Speaker 6: look at old Hollywood, but not this one.
Speaker 2: That's one of the reasons too, why it's so enduring
Speaker 2: is that we're not sitting there cringing at times, so
Speaker 2: it's very really I think the boy line just goes by,
Speaker 2: and yeah, the selling of people. I think is as
Speaker 2: appropriate with Sasha and the Professor as it is with Sam.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I agree that there's more of a pointed
Speaker 2: line there. Especially Americans were great at selling people back
Speaker 2: in the past, and maybe it'll come back.
Speaker 6: We don't know, We don't know. I was gonna say,
Speaker 6: I don't know. This is a generalization that I'm speaking
Speaker 6: out of turning saying. But like when I think about
Speaker 6: Warner Brothers films of this period, I think that they
Speaker 6: seem to know the common guy in the street, and
Speaker 6: like they specialize in like these kind of harder edged,
Speaker 6: working class appeal kind of stories. I think that's why
Speaker 6: their gangster films have never really completely gone out of date,
Speaker 6: because they have that kind of snappy pattern. I think
Speaker 6: about class in Casablanca and how you have that stuffy
Speaker 6: British couple get pickpocketed and you might like to pickpocket
Speaker 6: a little bit more because he's just so braceen. Or
Speaker 6: you have the couple get offended because Rick won't have
Speaker 6: a drink with them, but don't you know who he is,
Speaker 6: Like he's you know, the second most important banker, and
Speaker 6: it's like your money is not what makes you cool
Speaker 6: in that place, Like it's a chic nightclub, but it's
Speaker 6: not really favoring the wealthy somehow, which is another kind
Speaker 6: of thing that makes it interesting, just because it's it's
Speaker 6: inviting maybe that working class audience to see this kind
Speaker 6: of like more glamorous picture than Scarface, but you know,
Speaker 6: or you know, something like the Warner Brothers, like Little
Speaker 6: Caesar or something like that, but it is it is
Speaker 6: still slightly gangster adjacent, you know, as far as like
Speaker 6: the fixed gambling and just like the corruption and like
Speaker 6: the the slippery morals of the characters. Like it's friendly
Speaker 6: to the audience for those films, even though it's about
Speaker 6: something nobler, but it's not forgetting that audience either, which
Speaker 6: I think even all the faces that we know from
Speaker 6: crime films. I think that's another reason why it's so great,
Speaker 6: is because it has that connection to pulpier things.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the people of status. The people that he
Speaker 2: breaks his rule for are Victor Laslow and Ilsa, And
Speaker 2: I think that he would have broken the rule for
Speaker 2: just Victor Laslough. He knows of Victor Laslow in the
Speaker 2: way that he says the exploits are known everywhere. I
Speaker 2: think he really respects this guy.
Speaker 8: In speaking to the people that I saw the film
Speaker 8: with at this recent time, I tried to explain to
Speaker 8: them that I was learning about the vitriol that the
Speaker 8: Warner brothers had for the Nazis and how different it
Speaker 8: was at that time and how ahead of the ball
Speaker 8: they were in regards to the rest of the studios,
Speaker 8: because in reading about Critiz, I had no idea that
Speaker 8: in like in nineteen thirty three, right when the Nazis,
Speaker 8: like they were just starting out and they were basically
Speaker 8: a joke, they actually beat the Warner chief in Berlin
Speaker 8: and then they stole his car and beat him in
Speaker 8: the street and left them basically to die. Eight months
Speaker 8: later he died of his injuries, and Warner's basically decided, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 8: we're withdrawing from the German market. And there was also
Speaker 8: this component of Jack Warner being the most devout Jewish
Speaker 8: of the moguls, and there's this anger that is underneath
Speaker 8: casta blank at this righteous anger of something horrible is
Speaker 8: happening and we need Americans to take heed. And of
Speaker 8: course this came out after Pearl Harbor. I mean famously,
Speaker 8: the script came across Stephen Karna of the Reader's Desk
Speaker 8: December eighth, nineteen forty one, the day after Pearl Harbor,
Speaker 8: so they knew already that they were in it. But
Speaker 8: that Warner Brothers thing of like the low criminality, the
Speaker 8: scum element, but also there's just the anger, the righteous anger.
Speaker 8: They even funded the Anti Nazi League way toward g
Speaker 8: Robinson held at his house and then Graucho Marx equipped
Speaker 8: that Warner Brothers was the only studio with guts, so
Speaker 8: they didn't have any like financial incentive to cow tells
Speaker 8: of the Nazis and kind of papover what the true
Speaker 8: malice that they had, so they could show them for
Speaker 8: the scumbags that they are.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think Wonder Brothers always reminds me of Roger
Speaker 6: Corman in that they're both concerned with entertainment first, but
Speaker 6: they always have that socio political kind of element buried in,
Speaker 6: even in the less overtly political films, like less political
Speaker 6: than Casablanca, but it's always in there, like that social
Speaker 6: commentary is, they don't forget to be entertainments first, but
Speaker 6: they smuggle in these other elements all the time. And
Speaker 6: it's not just this one. But yeah, I mean, they're
Speaker 6: the perfect studio for this story. And the timing is
Speaker 6: golden for every step of Casablanca's when it comes out,
Speaker 6: when it's announced, when it comes back into reissue, like
Speaker 6: Casablanca is in lockstep with important events in world events,
Speaker 6: and it's just a charmed film on a number of
Speaker 6: levels in terms of the timing, which you know is
Speaker 6: part of what makes a film a hit.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've brought this book up before, and I really have
Speaker 2: to recommend it again, the Thomas Storty book, Hollywood and
Speaker 2: Hitler in nineteen thirty three to thirty nine, and just
Speaker 2: the way that you're talking about how there was that
Speaker 2: financial incentive and a lot of people didn't want to
Speaker 2: have their movies withdrawn from Germany because Germany was such
Speaker 2: a huge market and pretty soon Nazism was taking over Europe. Gosh,
Speaker 2: we're going to lose that market. We can't offend these guys.
Speaker 2: We have to be nice. We cannot openly criticize Hitler
Speaker 2: and Nazism. And I love that the Warner Brothers just
Speaker 2: didn't give a shit, and it was great that they
Speaker 2: did that, but there were so many people that were
Speaker 2: just falling right in line and going, oh no, no,
Speaker 2: don't worry if you can censor our films, We'll make
Speaker 2: sure that we don't say anything bad about you. And yeah,
Speaker 2: not this one. I love that line too that Rick
Speaker 2: has when he asked Sam what time it is?
Speaker 9: SAMs bose it was December nineteen forty one, and Cash
Speaker 9: a blank at what time was in New York?
Speaker 1: We my watch stuckleep in the yark?
Speaker 9: Better sleep all over America.
Speaker 2: I can really see where you're coming from here. It's
Speaker 2: time for us to wake up. And just Rick is America. Basically,
Speaker 2: he's the guy. I stick my neck out for no one.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna get involved in this fight. Leave me alone.
Speaker 2: I just want to sit here at my bar and
Speaker 2: have my little world. I don't need to be part
Speaker 2: of any of these other problems, and then eventually realizes, no,
Speaker 2: you're a part of this world. You have to get
Speaker 2: into this fight. It's just like when the Habbits were
Speaker 2: talking with tree Beard, kind of hold back this storm.
Speaker 7: We must weather such things as we have orways done.
Speaker 11: How can that be your decision?
Speaker 9: This is not our war.
Speaker 10: But you're part of this world, aren't you. You must help, please,
Speaker 10: you must do something.
Speaker 9: You are young and brave, Master Maty, but your part
Speaker 9: in the.
Speaker 7: Street is over. Go back to your hope.
Speaker 6: Sam has the most haunting delivery of the line, my
Speaker 6: watch stopped. That is maybe the most propaganda ish sounding
Speaker 6: like speech he has, as far as like I bet
Speaker 6: they're sleep all over America. But it still works. I
Speaker 6: still must to find it effective. As far as like
Speaker 6: the alright that we're touching on it. We're not gonna
Speaker 6: be too on the nose with this stuff too much.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it doesn't Sydney Green Street even have like a
Speaker 8: direct response to Rix like ambivalence. He says, isolationism is
Speaker 8: no longer a viable position to have anymore.
Speaker 2: Green Street is another one where I just again to
Speaker 2: two scenes right at the beginning, where we have him
Speaker 2: making those propositions to take over Sam and to buy
Speaker 2: ricks Barr, and then later on we get a little
Speaker 2: bit more of him. Actually I think three scenes, right yeah,
Speaker 2: because we have Rick coming in and talking with him
Speaker 2: and then saying to Laslow, oh yeah, he's the fat
Speaker 2: man and the fez in the corner or whatever, and
Speaker 2: then comes back and starts that whole mechanism in order
Speaker 2: to have all those dominoes fall into place at the end,
Speaker 2: of the film. And I love how quickly everything resolves
Speaker 2: itself in this film too, and that there's just that
Speaker 2: moment where you're like, Okay, I'm going to do this
Speaker 2: thing he says, and he's already thought through every single possibility,
Speaker 2: it feels like, and everything just works out exactly the
Speaker 2: way that it should, even when Renault tries to pull
Speaker 2: the rug out from under him and call stress Or
Speaker 2: rather than calling the airport, and that just helps us
Speaker 2: basically get stress Or killed, which I'm all four killing Nazis.
Speaker 2: And Conrad Veitt, yeah, is just phenomenal in here, and
Speaker 2: I love his whole thing. I love that story about
Speaker 2: how when he was still in Germany and he had
Speaker 2: to fill out a card or something where he was
Speaker 2: filling out his passport and for religious wrote jew and
Speaker 2: all apsents like, oh that's great even though he wasn't Jewish,
Speaker 2: but he was married to a Jewish woman. He's just like,
Speaker 2: fuck you.
Speaker 8: He's incredible in this. Only a couple of days ago
Speaker 8: I watched The Man Who Laughs Again with him and
Speaker 8: what an incredible career he had and what a like
Speaker 8: his like morality where he is he left Germany to
Speaker 8: come to America to work in the twenties, he was
Speaker 8: in all those like Universal films. Then sound came, his
Speaker 8: accent inability to learn English made him go back. He
Speaker 8: was like one of the highest paid people at UFA.
Speaker 8: Then thirty three real early, he leaves to England, becomes
Speaker 8: a naturalized British citizen, and then when he's working in Hollywood.
Speaker 8: During this entire period, he was the highest paid person
Speaker 8: in the entire cap. He gave his entire estate, most
Speaker 8: of his earnings to a British war relief. Not only that,
Speaker 8: there's little things too where Paul Henried, who was Jewish,
Speaker 8: had to leave and he got stuck in England when
Speaker 8: thirty nine fell, and since he was an Austrian national,
Speaker 8: the immigration police came to him and they're likes, hey,
Speaker 8: we need to know on which side you're going to be.
Speaker 8: We don't know your background, all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 8: And it was Conrad VT that actually vouched for him.
Speaker 8: He actually vouched for Paul Henried and said, no, I
Speaker 8: know him, we have a background on the stage.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 8: I just wanted to bring up the fact that one
Speaker 8: of the first things that you see after the opening
Speaker 8: montage was actually the minaret of the cul to prayer,
Speaker 8: like somebody's actually up there. You were talking about a
Speaker 8: Muslim adherence in Morocco and how it's just part of
Speaker 8: the background and you don't hear the call to prayer.
Speaker 8: In peppeal Imoco you do, but in Casablanki you don't.
Speaker 8: But just there.
Speaker 2: As an American born in the seventies, I wasn't sure
Speaker 2: who Marshall Patan was. I believe that was a gentleman's name,
Speaker 2: the guy who is running Vichy France, and that the
Speaker 2: guy is shot in front of that big poster of Batana.
Speaker 2: I was like, Oh, that's nice, that's very telling. And
Speaker 2: they've got that whole the double cross symbol and we
Speaker 2: get to see that there and then we get to
Speaker 2: see it in the guy's ring later on, and that
Speaker 2: helps too. When it came to Passage to Marseilles, which
Speaker 2: you mentioned a little bit earlier, you get to see
Speaker 2: that symbol a bunch more in there, and it's like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: now I know what this is. It had been a
Speaker 2: while since I'd seen Passage to Marseilles, so I'd forgotten
Speaker 2: what that that they were fighting for the Free French
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the cross of Lorrain. I love it. In Passage
Speaker 8: to Marseille at the beginning, it's emblazoned on the side
Speaker 8: of the B seventeens, and it's just you see them
Speaker 8: in Russian service, you see them in English service, but
Speaker 8: for free French service, it's really something else. And I
Speaker 8: just want to point out that the guy that up
Speaker 8: to them at the table burger, the character's name is
Speaker 8: John Quahlon. Like we talk about this supporting cast, of
Speaker 8: all supporting cast, this is the all time cast. But
Speaker 8: I love John Quaylon every single movie. I know him
Speaker 8: primarily from Groups of Wrath. He has that incredible scene
Speaker 8: at the beginning where he's a farmer basically made completely
Speaker 8: insane by the devastation of the dust bowl, and he
Speaker 8: has this weird, weird, like little ting accent, and it's
Speaker 8: because he's Canadian and his family is Norwegian, each and
Speaker 8: every single person. Basically, the Americans are the minority in
Speaker 8: this can I.
Speaker 2: Think he worked a lot with John Ford. If memory serves,
Speaker 2: I would not be surprised.
Speaker 8: John Ford also had a stock company.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that was the thing I liked about this
Speaker 2: one as well, and talking about having your green streets,
Speaker 2: your lories your Bogarts and then even the yeah Claude
Speaker 2: Rains to be able to see him show up in
Speaker 2: Pastures Marseille and just say, oh, okay, here's this guy again.
Speaker 2: One of them isn't in there, but even Michael Cartoo's
Speaker 2: directed that one, and I want a six Steiner might
Speaker 2: have done the music. It was like an old home week.
Speaker 2: When it came to watching that movie, I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is very familiar with all these faces and names
Speaker 2: in the credits.
Speaker 8: It's incredible because that was lensed by James Wong Howe,
Speaker 8: one of my favorite cinematographers. You want to talk about
Speaker 8: foreigners in Hollywood, James Wong how was a Chinese American
Speaker 8: working in Hollywood and he had an incredible career. By
Speaker 8: nowadays we talk about how hard it is for people
Speaker 8: of certain backgrounds to get into roles of cinematography. But
Speaker 8: he was supposed to lens Casablanca, and they put him
Speaker 8: on a different project. And I think it was Tenny Wright,
Speaker 8: the production manager at Warner Brothers. He was like the
Speaker 8: ultimate dictator and he told Curtis, there is no way
Speaker 8: I'm pulling James Wong how to come work on Casablanca.
Speaker 8: But then you look at Passes to Marseille, and the
Speaker 8: visuals of that movie absolutely floored me. I like within
Speaker 8: five minutes, I was like, Okay, this is why Curtis
Speaker 8: is oh special along with How. Of course Edison is
Speaker 8: all right in Casablanca, and the visuals are beautiful, But
Speaker 8: there is something to be said for a true like
Speaker 8: luminary like How.
Speaker 2: And that's the thing that can't be understated is that
Speaker 2: Casablanca was not set up to be some big prestige picture.
Speaker 2: It was just another Warner Brothers movie. People were assigned
Speaker 2: to it, people got picked up for it. It wasn't
Speaker 2: like there was a big casting call for that. It
Speaker 2: wasn't Who's gonna be Ilsa? You know, it was just okay,
Speaker 2: it could be this was it could be that person. Okay,
Speaker 2: we'll go with this one. It wasn't that big of
Speaker 2: a deal. And it just ended up reading all those
Speaker 2: right notes just coming together. That phrase lightning in a bottle.
Speaker 2: That's what this movie ended up being, and had things
Speaker 2: that played out the way that they played out, might
Speaker 2: not be talking about this movie in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 6: Anytime they tried to vote Casablanca in contemporary films, whether
Speaker 6: it's Havana or The Good German, and then it always
Speaker 6: feels weighted down by this kind of pressure to be
Speaker 6: a classic, whereas part of what makes Casablanca so great
Speaker 6: is that it's so light on its feet and races
Speaker 6: along and it doesn't feel like it's trying to be
Speaker 6: something important. It just winds up being important. And I
Speaker 6: think that all of the films that try to evoke it,
Speaker 6: they fair best when they don't seem to be trying
Speaker 6: to do it exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about that attempt to recapture that lightning again.
Speaker 2: We're going to take a break and we'll be back
Speaker 2: with a pair of interviews. First up, we'll hear from
Speaker 2: the author of We'll Always Have Casablanca, Noah Eisenberg. After that,
Speaker 2: we'll hear from Alan k Roady, the author of Michael Kurtiz,
Speaker 2: A Life in Film, and we'll be back with both
Speaker 2: of those right after these brief messages.
Speaker 13: Hello, everyone, this is Malcolm McDowell. I just want to
Speaker 13: say that this is a request to listeners of the
Speaker 13: Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via
Speaker 13: Patreon dot com, p A T eo N dot com.
Speaker 7: Slash projection booth.
Speaker 13: That's pretty simple.
Speaker 7: I think you can do that.
Speaker 13: It's a great show, and Mike, he provides hours of
Speaker 13: great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my
Speaker 13: little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have
Speaker 13: a sip of the old Molocco, and then.
Speaker 7: You'll be ready for a little of the.
Speaker 2: Old in out, in out, real horror show.
Speaker 11: Bye bye.
Speaker 2: I know last time when we talked, we were discussing
Speaker 2: actually two times, I believe we had you on the
Speaker 2: show to talk about Edgar Olmer because of your biography
Speaker 2: of him. I'm so curious how you went from Olmer
Speaker 2: to Casablanca.
Speaker 11: Okay, the Olmer book, which I'm happy to say sorry shamelessly,
Speaker 11: is now out on paperback, which is great. Ten years
Speaker 11: later they brought out a paperback edition that was a
Speaker 11: labor of love and a labor of many years. The
Speaker 11: Casablanca book came as an opportunity to write for a
Speaker 11: more popular audience. Not strictly, the ome biography was an
Speaker 11: attempt to straddle both a slightly more scholarly film geekish
Speaker 11: world and slightly more popular audience. But the Casablanca book
Speaker 11: was from the very beginning, written with an eye towards
Speaker 11: it's a trade book. It was commissioned by Norton, and
Speaker 11: I was very happy to work with my editor there,
Speaker 11: Matt Wiland. It's from the Twin Cities originally.
Speaker 14: And.
Speaker 11: I was talking with Molly Haskell, and Molly Haskell the
Speaker 11: great pioneering feminist film critic from Reverence to Rape, among
Speaker 11: many other fabulous titles. She's a a great mentor and
Speaker 11: friend and support. And we were having lunch not long after. Frankly,
Speaker 11: my dear, her book on Gone with the Wind had
Speaker 11: appeared in the American Icon series at Yale University Press,
Speaker 11: and we were talking about different movies, and somehow we
Speaker 11: got to Casablanca. Didn't take us very long, and she said, no, she didn't. No,
Speaker 11: you really was made for you. You've got this emmigrade
Speaker 11: cast and crew for that matter. It's just a story
Speaker 11: that continues to resonate with audiences and one that you
Speaker 11: know that I held, especially Dear. It's when we were talking
Speaker 11: about my mom moments ago. I think it was my
Speaker 11: mama first showed me the film when I was young,
Speaker 11: and I think it was actually quite resistant to it initially,
Speaker 11: but obviously came around to appreciate it. I overcame my
Speaker 11: teenage rebellious years when I thought that anything like Casablanca
Speaker 11: was just that was strictly for old people. Strange out
Speaker 11: things change over time, but anyway, and so it was
Speaker 11: her idea, and I initially was going to try to
Speaker 11: pitch it to that series. The series, however, went it
Speaker 11: came to an end. We don't want to say it
Speaker 11: went belly up, but it no longer exists. And so
Speaker 11: at that point in time, I had done a fair
Speaker 11: amount of freelance writing for different publications, meaning for in
Speaker 11: this case popular publication, so for the New Republic, for
Speaker 11: the Nation, for the Time, for their Times book review,
Speaker 11: and for places like that. And I'm married to a
Speaker 11: writer and editor and critic, and so I watched from
Speaker 11: afar how the trade press process works, and I figured,
Speaker 11: what the heck, I've got some credentials here. I've written
Speaker 11: pre lance stuffin actually was really Molly's encouragement too, So
Speaker 11: why not, if you're not going to do it for
Speaker 11: a university press, why not try and go to the
Speaker 11: trade path. And I did, and I'm very happy. I
Speaker 11: don't think it was too gimmicky but there was the hook,
Speaker 11: which was that the seventy fifth anniversary was coming up,
Speaker 11: and so that I mentioned moments ago that the Omer
Speaker 11: project was very much a labor of love, which is
Speaker 11: not to say that this wasn't as well, but the
Speaker 11: only project was one that also took me, oh god,
Speaker 11: a decade and a half from start to finish. It
Speaker 11: was a really long project. I conducted research on at
Speaker 11: least two contents, if not three, I can't remember now
Speaker 11: in the end, but it was just it.
Speaker 8: It just did.
Speaker 11: It took on various shapes and morphed, and I ended
Speaker 11: up doing the BFI Film Classics book on Detour in
Speaker 11: the midst of it. And then it was during that
Speaker 11: process I think also that in my conversations with my editor,
Speaker 11: Mary Francis, who actually is an editor at the University
Speaker 11: of Michigan Press now, and she thought, you know what, Noah,
Speaker 11: maybe you should try to do this what they call
Speaker 11: academic trade.
Speaker 8: So I was all kind.
Speaker 11: Of indicators were pointing towards this new effort on my
Speaker 11: part to speak with a popular audience. And so the
Speaker 11: Casablanca book, occasioned by the seventy fifth anniversary of the movie,
Speaker 11: became that opportunity, and I was very happy with how
Speaker 11: it turned out, and it was a lot of fun
Speaker 11: to write. Expressed my deep indebtedness to aljin Harmitz and
Speaker 11: to her pioneering work. Round Up the usual suspects as
Speaker 11: it was original. That was a title under which it
Speaker 11: was originally released.
Speaker 2: And we met.
Speaker 11: We actually in twenty seventeen. We went on this State
Speaker 11: Department junket to Morocco to it was fantastic. It was
Speaker 11: Algean Harmitz, Monica Henry, Paul Henry's daughter, and Jessica Rains
Speaker 11: Claude Raines's daughter. We went and introduced a few screenings
Speaker 11: of Casablanca in Morocco in Casablanca, and I went onward
Speaker 11: to Tangier and then ultimately to Robot and it was
Speaker 11: so much fun. But al Jean harmit's without her book
Speaker 11: and without the interviews.
Speaker 7: That she could have.
Speaker 11: So many of those folks were long gone. By the
Speaker 11: time I started my book. I had to give it
Speaker 11: my own spin, and I had been thanks to the
Speaker 11: Ulmer project and some of my other work. I was
Speaker 11: still very invested in that emigrat crowd that managed to
Speaker 11: make it the whole refugee trail. That's chronicled semi fictitiously,
Speaker 11: semi documentarily in Casablanca. I've been retracing those steps and
Speaker 11: following the different paths that led to Hollywood from Middle Oil,
Speaker 11: but from Central Europe, largely German speaking Europe, but also
Speaker 11: French speaking, and while in the case of Sasha the Barman,
Speaker 11: Russian speaking, though he had to eat as he claims
Speaker 11: his German was the least of the coffee clutch variety,
Speaker 11: so hanging with the Teutonic set. But that was the
Speaker 11: chance to write a book that had a my way
Speaker 11: of characterizing, I guess would be a blend of journalistic
Speaker 11: breeziness with scholarly air udition. And that's it's funny. Those
Speaker 11: are my twin pillars, a tween goals. I'm trying my
Speaker 11: best not to finish up the follow up project on
Speaker 11: some like it hot, which the culture does do some
Speaker 11: might get hot, and basically trying to continue in that
Speaker 11: same vein writing on that most storied of screwball comedies
Speaker 11: and great, great, the great American sex comedy. And so
Speaker 11: the lessons I guess that I learned in writing this
Speaker 11: book have have stuck with me. I wish I were
Speaker 11: a faster writer. I wish, and I wish I didn't
Speaker 11: have these other things that are attention. I've been doing
Speaker 11: a lot of university leadership stuff sharing and was associated
Speaker 11: DAN last year and now serving as executive director of
Speaker 11: these programs.
Speaker 2: It's just fun.
Speaker 11: I enjoy it, but it's hard to have that sustained,
Speaker 11: uninterrupted time. You know that every scholar a writer year
Speaker 11: in sport. It's hard to have it when doing these
Speaker 11: other things. So my I guess I shouldn't give so
Speaker 11: many apologies. But where I left my own device, I'd
Speaker 11: be able to sit down and you know that the
Speaker 11: sits flash. I'd be able to just sit and ammer
Speaker 11: away at the keys and knock out this book project
Speaker 11: because after that, I'm to write a short interpretive biography
Speaker 11: of Wilder.
Speaker 7: Or it's not.
Speaker 11: There's no longer the American Icon series at Yale Universe Press,
Speaker 11: but there is the Yale Jewish Live Series at Yale
Speaker 11: University Press. So I will that's the last in my
Speaker 11: trio a certain menage attois of Wilder projects that includes
Speaker 11: the last book that I was lucky enough to finish up,
Speaker 11: which is Billy Wilder on Assignment Dispatches from y mar
Speaker 11: Borlin and into War Vienna, which I did with a
Speaker 11: translator friend and colleague of mine, Shelley Fish. It's a
Speaker 11: superbly talented translator, award winning translator, So that was a
Speaker 11: lot of fun. But yes, if I can just get
Speaker 11: some like it hot book out the door, then the
Speaker 11: interpretive biography of Wilder and maybe my Wilder three Ways.
Speaker 2: Will be behind.
Speaker 11: But yeah, the Casa Blanca book was a lot of
Speaker 11: fun to write, and the apropos early of the earlier
Speaker 11: much yearned for, sadly frequently neglected, precious time off. I
Speaker 11: was lucky enough to get one of these Any Age
Speaker 11: Public Scholar Awards as their first. It was the inaugural
Speaker 11: group of Any Age Scholars that is a category of
Speaker 11: the National Dowber. Who knows whether we have or even
Speaker 11: today have a national Undown. Few mandays we'll see shouldn't
Speaker 11: be so cynical, but the scary times. Anyway, I was
Speaker 11: lucky to have one of those for an entire year,
Speaker 11: so that that made it possible, and I would work
Speaker 11: on Washington Square in Bolk's Library. I was not I'm
Speaker 11: not affiliated with NYU, but with my new school idea,
Speaker 11: then you could go in there and just and hammer away,
Speaker 11: and it was great. Managed to just really knock that
Speaker 11: one out.
Speaker 2: With this episode, I'm struggling a little bit, and I'm
Speaker 2: curious if you struggled a little bit as well, because
Speaker 2: what is there left to say about Casablanca? So how
Speaker 2: did you determine? This is what I'm going to do,
Speaker 2: This is how I'm going to leave my mark on it.
Speaker 11: I have a tendency I haven't really I need to
Speaker 11: go to some intense psychoanalysis at some point, but a
Speaker 11: tendency to take up subjects that are have trodden paths,
Speaker 11: that have covered pretty much. So I wrote my doctoral
Speaker 11: dissertation on figures like Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin and
Speaker 11: these others who so many others had come before me.
Speaker 11: But for whatever reason, I don't know why. Maybe it's
Speaker 11: but maybe it's hardheadedness, stubbornness, not sure, but I like
Speaker 11: to write on subjects that hold my attention and that
Speaker 11: animate me and about which I have a large degree
Speaker 11: of passion and really take pleasure and write. It's a
Speaker 11: very foreign idea, anathema to academics call it usually academic colleguere.
Speaker 11: So you picture the Monty Python skit. It like the
Speaker 11: intellectual wrestling with himself or something or this, especially in
Speaker 11: the humanities academic scholarship, has often thought if he's completely
Speaker 11: stripped of all bleacher But for whatever reason, I never
Speaker 11: gave up on that, because I also figured I'd never
Speaker 11: finish anything unless I unless it gave me a certain
Speaker 11: amount of pleasure, and unless I was engaged to the
Speaker 11: degree that it held my attention. And more specifically to Casablanca. Sure,
Speaker 11: with Altine Harmitz's book, Who the hell Needs to write
Speaker 11: Another book? She really covered a lot the anchor if
Speaker 11: we go, the Dude's rug, and the big Lebowski that
Speaker 11: kind of ties the whole room together, the anchor in
Speaker 11: this the chapter on the refugees such much, which for
Speaker 11: me is really all up the wait. I was just
Speaker 11: tie up the te together the entire room. But can
Speaker 11: tie together my interests that I've been pursuing over the
Speaker 11: past several decades, essentially since entering into the whatever hallowed
Speaker 11: walls of academ and teaching classes on exiles in Hollywood,
Speaker 11: and teaching classes on Bresh and on and all these
Speaker 11: filmmakers that I've been including Omer, including Wilder, including zennemn
Speaker 11: and Lang and more Now for that matter as well.
Speaker 11: That was Omer's beginnings were led to Omar and led
Speaker 11: to more Now and working on more Now's storied American
Speaker 11: debut at Fox Studios Sunrise, one of the most beautiful,
Speaker 11: silent pictures ever made. And so the such much chapter
Speaker 11: was a chance for me to.
Speaker 8: Refract.
Speaker 11: So, if you pardon me, this film through this lens
Speaker 11: of the refugees. When the book came out in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 11: we were in the first phase of Trump one point zero,
Speaker 11: and you remember you had the Muslim band, and we
Speaker 11: were in a real state of another sort of refugee crisis,
Speaker 11: so to speak. Can I guess that there wasn't planned
Speaker 11: that way? And I certainly wouldn't wish that upon anyone
Speaker 11: to face the sort of threats that various aliens now
Speaker 11: in air quotes or foreigners faced at that moment in time.
Speaker 11: But the book, I think, in particular that chapter struck
Speaker 11: a certain chord. Now, of course we're in trunk two
Speaker 11: point zero. That's funny. I'm writing on cross dressing and
Speaker 11: drag performance, and once again, there seems to be a
Speaker 11: certain almost subversive quality was never intended that way writing
Speaker 11: on refugees I wasn't tend necessarily to be any way
Speaker 11: subversive or transgressive, but that was my way of making
Speaker 11: the material really into my own. Of course, I follow
Speaker 11: some of those well trodden paths of production history, my
Speaker 11: sort of almost they're not exactly capsule biography or thumbnail,
Speaker 11: but I've got I need to account for the biography
Speaker 11: all these different actors and film professionals whose biographies had
Speaker 11: either been written or were, in the case of Critis,
Speaker 11: we're in the process of being written. I'm thinking about
Speaker 11: Alan Roady's wonderful biography of Critiz. So this was really
Speaker 11: my chance, I think, to give it my own spin,
Speaker 11: which is not to say that's a massive augmentation of
Speaker 11: the material that that Aldi Hermetz was dealing with in
Speaker 11: her round up the usual suspects, but it does take
Speaker 11: it into some different directions of a different places, and
Speaker 11: in particular that the chapter such much the kind of
Speaker 11: anchors the book. Yeah, I mean, when this some like
Speaker 11: a hot book, would have do my best to get
Speaker 11: to finish line. It's there too, where so much has
Speaker 11: been written about that movie, and we've had all of
Speaker 11: these and thankfully it's not in this case that I
Speaker 11: don't need to worry about an anniversary. So it's not
Speaker 11: identy specific anniversary. But so much has been written about it,
Speaker 11: But what hasn't really been written about it is what
Speaker 11: precedes Some Like It Hot. So again, taking me my
Speaker 11: having trained began at Berkeley as a student of Weymar,
Speaker 11: Germany and writing on Vymar culture and the sort of
Speaker 11: the film and literature and music of that period, theater
Speaker 11: of that period, Some Like It Hot is enormously laden
Speaker 11: with Weimar culture, so to speak, with Billy Wilder having
Speaker 11: begun his career, and that's why, Actually it turns out
Speaker 11: that Billy wildern assignment was a great precursor to the
Speaker 11: book on for me to write in the book on
Speaker 11: something like It Hot. But in that case too, it's
Speaker 11: incumbent upon me to give it my own kind of angle.
Speaker 11: Whether or not I succeed in either case or and
Speaker 11: in any case, is really up to the reader to decide.
Speaker 11: But I will try to bring breathe some sort of
Speaker 11: fresh air into it and have it come to life
Speaker 11: in light of some different material that I don't think
Speaker 11: has been brought into conversation with a movie like Some
Speaker 11: Might Get Hot. And I tried to do much of
Speaker 11: this much the same in the book on custom Black.
Speaker 11: I mean, it's funny when I think this through. I've
Speaker 11: been now teaching and in academia as a after having
Speaker 11: finished my degree. I'm hitting the thirty year mark, so
Speaker 11: I'm beginning to get a little bit wistful, and I'm
Speaker 11: reflecting upon everything. I wonder, whether being in Berkeley in
Speaker 11: the first half of the nineteen nineties when this new
Speaker 11: historicism was really taking hold, and my dissertation advisor Anton
Speaker 11: Kays Tony Kayes, who wrote this wonderful book called From
Speaker 11: Hitler to Heimat, taking his title from the crack Hour
Speaker 11: from Calgary to Hitler, but this is on the new
Speaker 11: German cinema, from Hitler to tim and it was very
Speaker 11: much steeped to the kind of new historicist approach, meaning
Speaker 11: taking different moments, different different excuse me, different like kind
Speaker 11: of cultural artifacts from a given moment and bring in
Speaker 11: the conversation with in this case, in his case as
Speaker 11: well as in my case, with film of the period,
Speaker 11: but bringing other kind of philosophical debates or sociological but
Speaker 11: trying to do this, I have to say I'm also
Speaker 11: very indebted to him as a mentor of mine. Because
Speaker 11: he often, even though he was very much a extremely
Speaker 11: erudi film scholar and still is to this day even
Speaker 11: though he's retired, he always often wrote with a kind
Speaker 11: of almost playful and a lighter touch. And it's funny,
Speaker 11: so number of the newest stores is especially Burgler at
Speaker 11: that time, like Stephen Greenblat, the great Shakespeare scholar, also
Speaker 11: wrote with a lighter touch, and I think also wrote, ultimately,
Speaker 11: in the case of green Black, more than my mentor
Speaker 11: for popular audience. Ultimately wrote and continues to write about,
Speaker 11: whether it's in the New Yorker magazine or whether it's
Speaker 11: his books that are again dealing with the long life
Speaker 11: after life, so to speak, of good old billy Shakespeare,
Speaker 11: but doing so for large endings. I don't know. I
Speaker 11: haven't thought that one through entirely, but I've begun to
Speaker 11: recognize certain reflexes, I guess our tendencies that you that
Speaker 11: I can spot in my work, and I think it's
Speaker 11: actually on display in the Casa Blanca book as well.
Speaker 2: That's such much chapter that you're talking about is one
Speaker 2: of my favorites of the whole book, especially just because
Speaker 2: the way that those characters are treated, they're not just wallpaper.
Speaker 2: If you don't have those characters. Yeah, sure you got
Speaker 2: the romance, you got Ilsa and and all that, but
Speaker 2: it's like they add so much in those little vignettes
Speaker 2: and like learning more about Sasha and the whole like
Speaker 2: come back right away, like I don't trust to you
Speaker 2: kind of thing. I love those parts.
Speaker 11: That was a really important chapter for me to write.
Speaker 11: And what Pauline Kale said about the film that you
Speaker 11: otherwise ignore or even held a certain degree of contempt
Speaker 11: for and calling it schlocky romanticism, she says an interview
Speaker 11: with Algine Harmat, she says that were it not for
Speaker 11: those refugees playing refugees on screen, it would just be
Speaker 11: had American actors in there trying to fake these accents.
Speaker 11: It just it wouldn't have the hef the emotional haft
Speaker 11: that it has. Look Madeline le Beau, the last surviving
Speaker 11: cast member who died now several years ago in a
Speaker 11: Spanish coastal town. I think it was, you know, she
Speaker 11: was nineteen at the time. She and her husband had
Speaker 11: just escaped, her husband of course, playing Ami the Coupier,
Speaker 11: who was a great star back in France. In a
Speaker 11: number of Rules of the game and the Grande Lucina,
Speaker 11: but she had actually followed that path, and so when
Speaker 11: she's belting out La marseillees, those are real tears. That's
Speaker 11: the Dan Seymour line. Dan Seymour plays Abdul the door Man.
Speaker 11: It was born Chicago. It was Dan Seymour Katz I
Speaker 11: think was his name, figured up off the cats that
Speaker 11: maybe didn't seem so ethnic. But anyway, he said he
Speaker 11: couldn't believe that they're watching, and he's looking around the
Speaker 11: room and suddenly the real tears were streaming down her faith.
Speaker 11: They were reliving it in many ways. And so I
Speaker 11: think that the souch Much chapter is in so many
Speaker 11: ways the anchor for the book. But it was also
Speaker 11: I think that was the chapter that felt to me.
Speaker 11: And maybe it was also the political moment which the
Speaker 11: book was released in all of that, but it felt
Speaker 11: there was a kind of urgency for me in that chapter.
Speaker 11: And look, you're absolute right. Look, most people watch this
Speaker 11: movie and I guess it's still technically February now today,
Speaker 11: the twenty fourth, but it's usually about ten days ago
Speaker 11: on the fourteenth, on Valentine's Day, where you have these
Speaker 11: screenings and it's really It's all about the romance. It's
Speaker 11: all about that bitter but also magnificent romance between Rick
Speaker 11: and Ilsa, I guess by turns bitter and magnificent, and
Speaker 11: the wish fulfillment that is suspended in a way at
Speaker 11: the end, the need to repress one's libidinal and personal
Speaker 11: desire for the greater good, something that is so anathemach
Speaker 11: of the current political age, it seems. But that's what
Speaker 11: people tended to focus on, and why not. But I
Speaker 11: think what was much less recognized and much less had
Speaker 11: really made its way to kind of the popular imagination.
Speaker 11: The way that these iconic images of Rick and Ilsa
Speaker 11: on the tarmac, or Rick and Ilsa in the Breisian flashback,
Speaker 11: or Rick and Ilsa when she comes and meets him
Speaker 11: in his man cave, his layer above Rick's cafe, those
Speaker 11: are the images I think that people hold dear and
Speaker 11: have held dear over now eight decades. But I think
Speaker 11: that the refugee story is something that for most people
Speaker 11: is utterly unknown. It's I think it was Andrea Asimon,
Speaker 11: who is a great novelist, critic, memoirist. Is He's got
Speaker 11: a new book out. No I'm chilling for Andrea Asimon's
Speaker 11: I had a wonderful book. I just read it recently.
Speaker 11: I called my I think it's called My Roman Years
Speaker 11: when his family first he did out of Egypt, which
Speaker 11: is the family of his story, leaving Alexandria Egypt. But
Speaker 11: this My Roman Year is really terrific in any cases,
Speaker 11: Andrey Asimon, who told me, I interviewed a lot of
Speaker 11: people for this project. I couldn't interview those who passed, unfortunately,
Speaker 11: unless we communicated somehow beyond the grave with one another.
Speaker 11: But I didn't manage to interview Ondre Ausimon.
Speaker 8: He said.
Speaker 11: He called it a certain structure, not to be overly academic,
Speaker 11: but his structural absence in the film, you have Jews.
Speaker 11: They're all over the screen, but nowhere in the picture.
Speaker 11: And there's that. And by the way, they weren't all doish.
Speaker 11: There were also those like al Mucdantine and Conrad Veidt
Speaker 11: who were principled anti Nazis. And look, for that matter,
Speaker 11: Paul Henry, I don't want to forget him. Oh God,
Speaker 11: Monica would kill me who were anti Nazis. In case
Speaker 11: of Paul Henry, who plays one on screen, many of
Speaker 11: the others, including no and Tina he gets to play
Speaker 11: Jan Brandel, so she still he plays a Nazi. Of course,
Speaker 11: Miss he plays a Nazi flyer the air men in
Speaker 11: Miss Miniver. But connor Veit, who plays a major Strasser,
Speaker 11: he had experienced the Nazis person and was married to
Speaker 11: a Jewish woman, Lipraga, who is a famous theater stage actress.
Speaker 11: And there was so much invested I think in this production,
Speaker 11: in that regard on the emotionally invested money. It was
Speaker 11: run of the mill, Warner's Warner Brothers picture, nothing terribly
Speaker 11: lavish in terms of budget, and as people have told
Speaker 11: and told again, nobody had any idea what it would
Speaker 11: go on to become. They were making a movie, and obviously,
Speaker 11: as we now learned, I think is especially with respect
Speaker 11: to the refugee question, so to speak, I think there
Speaker 11: was tons invested on the part. And again whether it's
Speaker 11: Mike Curtiz who had fled himself, Peter Lourie again, a
Speaker 11: lot of the sort of the day players as well.
Speaker 11: The title such much comes from Ludwig Stirussel and Ika Kgrouni,
Speaker 11: who were both Austrian. Accuracy were unknown, utterly unknown, and
Speaker 11: they have that little cute exchange you know what, Hinder
Speaker 11: vaner Fassbender only slightly exaggerated, les, this is the most
Speaker 11: beautiful piece of dialogue ever written in the history of
Speaker 11: motion pictures. When they have this sort of banter back
Speaker 11: and forth learning their English for America, preparing you know what,
Speaker 11: watch can watch such much. That's just it's wooden and
Speaker 11: literal translation from the German into English. And what's the
Speaker 11: sort of sly in joke for the emmigret set. And
Speaker 11: I guess for audiences that at that point in time too.
Speaker 11: This is you know, released Thanksgiving Day in nineteen forty two,
Speaker 11: not very far from where I'm seated here in Midtel, Manhattan,
Speaker 11: the old Hollywood Theater now ay a parking garage. But
Speaker 11: I think people were studying and in your parts for sure,
Speaker 11: in Michigan, in Wisconsin, no doubt, Minnesota, throughout the Midwest,
Speaker 11: people were still studying German. So I think that it
Speaker 11: wasn't at all in common, especially if you were educated
Speaker 11: in college educated specifically that you would have taken some German.
Speaker 11: So I think so much of the German banter in
Speaker 11: this movie is left entirely untranslated, and either you're getting
Speaker 11: it or at least you have enough of an idea
Speaker 11: to get it. And I think today they wouldn't do that.
Speaker 11: I think we've become increasingly monolingual. It's not a very
Speaker 11: profound statement, but I think at that point in time again,
Speaker 11: because of our history of migration and the enormous German
Speaker 11: speaking community throughout, not just the Midwest.
Speaker 7: Is funny.
Speaker 11: I was in the Austin Texas and the whole country
Speaker 11: in Texas to especially in nineteenth century, had a large migration.
Speaker 11: Only you have the Pennsylvania Dutch, but that's actually just
Speaker 11: a misnomer. It's a Pensylvania Deutsch. They just call it Dutch.
Speaker 11: They are right, but they're German speakers as well throughout.
Speaker 11: And then of course you have the Amish. You're not
Speaker 11: just in Pennsylvania, but in Ohio and elsewhere. I think that,
Speaker 11: and I'm not suggesting that the Amish were actually flocking
Speaker 11: to go see get me wrong, but people I'm sure
Speaker 11: were at least vaguely familiar with some of that. As
Speaker 11: leonit Kinski, who plays Sash of the Barman as he
Speaker 11: called it, that sort of cafe Klutch German. You would
Speaker 11: have heard it around the way, so to speak, and
Speaker 11: it gives it that texture. It really does the scene.
Speaker 11: So when Arthur Edison's camera pans the interior of Rick's cafe,
Speaker 11: and we have those sort of snatches of dialogue in
Speaker 11: all of these foreign languages, including Leonid Kinsky's native Russian.
Speaker 11: When he wishes the brit who does a little cheerio
Speaker 11: to him, he gives him a nostrova when they're and
Speaker 11: you have the Chinese who are speaking to one another,
Speaker 11: you have French spoken, you have Italian for the sort
Speaker 11: of the comedy almost bought Borsch Bulkshtick where the Italian
Speaker 11: can't get in a word edgewise with And so I
Speaker 11: think that those you know, again, I returned to build
Speaker 11: pulline Kale's comment, which I think is is such a
Speaker 11: valid one that with if you had American actors who
Speaker 11: are faking those accents, it just it wouldn't have that
Speaker 11: that veneer at least, if not more than just a veneer,
Speaker 11: but that veneer of authenticity, right or it just it
Speaker 11: feels and that even from the very opening of this film,
Speaker 11: and that's what I was joking moments ago and seeing
Speaker 11: this sort of this semi documentary touch of the film,
Speaker 11: which is it opens and it's got that newsreel style
Speaker 11: announcing what's happening in in Casablanca and these refugees, from
Speaker 11: the very beginning with tipped off, Aha, We've got a
Speaker 11: crisis on our hands and throughout it. Look, this is
Speaker 11: a film that had to, like any film made after
Speaker 11: Pearl Harbor, had to pass through the Office of War
Speaker 11: Information and get the sort of the seal of approval
Speaker 11: that it lends support to the Allied war effort. This film, too,
Speaker 11: is very much aimed at galvanizing support. Rick is, as
Speaker 11: we know, and is that right in the book, is
Speaker 11: really a sort of almost a cipher of sort of
Speaker 11: American foreign policy, right. And it's the character arc of
Speaker 11: Rick Blaine that moves from that the Professions of isolationism.
Speaker 11: I stick my net out for nobody, which he others two,
Speaker 11: possibly even three times, I can't remember now. I think
Speaker 11: it's certainly twice. I think even at least then he
Speaker 11: intimates it maybe the third time. But to that principled engagement,
Speaker 11: the support for the Allied war effort to such a
Speaker 11: degree that he's going to put ills on that plane
Speaker 11: to head off with Victor to fight the good fight,
Speaker 11: and he's going to march off with his panion with
Speaker 11: Captain Renault with claud Rains and heads to the Free
Speaker 11: French garrison. The whole film is so economical and moves
Speaker 11: so swiftly. But that's a very tidy way of ending
Speaker 11: the film and not running into hot water with the
Speaker 11: Production Code administration too, because Ilsa has cannot stay with Rick,
Speaker 11: even though audience is like, no, you can't leave him
Speaker 11: all this, she stays with Rick, and that production is
Speaker 11: going to have to get shelved. You're more than It's
Speaker 11: like a full throated endorsement of adultery, and you can
Speaker 11: allude to adultery, as the film abundantly does numerous even
Speaker 11: on the tarmac. When Rick says to Victory, this is
Speaker 11: it's funny. It's almost like John Tarture. I keep coming
Speaker 11: back to Labowski. I don't know why, but John tarturos
Speaker 11: that Jesus with his bowling ball there, when Rick is like, yes,
Speaker 11: she came, and she Ilsa she wanted. She claimed that
Speaker 11: she was still lovely and I let let her show it.
Speaker 11: I don't know. I don't know if that's a definition
Speaker 11: of peacocking or what the right term is for that,
Speaker 11: but basically, it's like I had her too something. There's
Speaker 11: a lot of much cheese bummy. Course it's bogie and
Speaker 11: there's a lot of swagger. But you can do that
Speaker 11: and get away with it. But you can't have Ilsa
Speaker 11: stay with him on that darmac and let her husband,
Speaker 11: God forbid, board that playing without her. So it's a
Speaker 11: very neat and tidy way of ending it and leading
Speaker 11: to the audiences the viewer's imagination what's going to happen next?
Speaker 11: Is Ill's going to return? And that's why people have
Speaker 11: all these sort of spin offs and all the Simpsons
Speaker 11: whatever it is, half a dozen more than half a
Speaker 11: dozen episodes that have little Casablanca spokes in all of
Speaker 11: the New Yorker cartoons and all that is that it
Speaker 11: allows you to imagine, oh what next it So if
Speaker 11: you're David Thompson and you're writing in his novel or
Speaker 11: it's more of a collection of aphorism, but it's fictional,
Speaker 11: all based on different films. When it gets to when
Speaker 11: it gets to Casablanca, though, you imagine that it's really
Speaker 11: it's Rick and Renault. They are the true lovers that
Speaker 11: Rick is marching off with Claude Rains, and that they
Speaker 11: will consummate their love. And there's so many moments throughout
Speaker 11: the film where Claude rains as Captain Renault professes his
Speaker 11: love of Rick. Right, were I a woman? And all
Speaker 11: these yes, Oh they're y ricky. The banter between the
Speaker 11: two of them, it's more than even the I think
Speaker 11: homo eroticism between Barton Keys and Walter Neff in Double Indemnity,
Speaker 11: which is also laden with I think as Parker always
Speaker 11: transposed those two days. One of the early film critics,
Speaker 11: Parker Tyler, who wrote on homosexuality in Cinema.
Speaker 2: When you start writing about the post Casablanca and just
Speaker 2: mentioned the Simpsons and David Thompson's book, that feels to
Speaker 2: me like you must have spent an inordinate amount of
Speaker 2: time working on all of those references that came in that.
Speaker 2: To now, it's almost eighty years or eighty some years.
Speaker 11: So there's a new film out Austin favorite Richard link Later,
Speaker 11: Rick link Later. He's got a new film that just
Speaker 11: premiered at the Berly Nale a week ago called Blue Moon,
Speaker 11: and Ethan Hawk plays. I think it's barman is his
Speaker 11: main He's a barman, but I think he also is
Speaker 11: he writes music. He's a musician. I haven't seen you.
Speaker 8: I'm just heard about it.
Speaker 11: But apparently there's a lot of Casa Blanca banter in
Speaker 11: that film as well. And it just it's one of
Speaker 11: those movies because it's so deeply ingrained in the in
Speaker 11: our consciousness, right in our kind of popular imagination, and
Speaker 11: because we know these lines, even if we've never even
Speaker 11: seen the movie. We know these lines. We know that
Speaker 11: whatever we all like, always have Paris or my case,
Speaker 11: will always have Casklanka. But we know the shocked, shocked.
Speaker 11: We know here's looking at you. We know these lines.
Speaker 15: It's a an easy way, I think, to reference something
Speaker 15: that has really broad appeal and that it's in our
Speaker 15: collective register, people will recognize it.
Speaker 11: And whether it's in a satirical vein or a more
Speaker 11: serious vein, it just it's you see it over and
Speaker 11: over again. I looked at book came out in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 11: and I referenced Blue Moon as it's called the new
Speaker 11: link later movie, which haven't yet seen. But there are
Speaker 11: so many films that have come since Sentence. I found myself.
Speaker 11: Spielberg was a huge fan of Casablanca. He's a huge
Speaker 11: fan of just classical Hollywood in general. I think was
Speaker 11: one of those people who's weaned on the movies and
Speaker 11: it just stayed in it part of his toolbox. But
Speaker 11: I was in the mountains last month and we had
Speaker 11: a DVD player, remember Them, and it was in the
Speaker 11: place where were staying, and you could check out movies,
Speaker 11: and we got the box set of Raiders that lost
Speaker 11: the whole Raiders franchise, and I had seen not all
Speaker 11: of them, but a lot of them, and I just
Speaker 11: couldn't believe how many of them have a certain almost
Speaker 11: a Rick's Cafe or a kind of There's so there
Speaker 11: just seem to be so many, either subtle or in
Speaker 11: certain instances even more explicit allusions to Casablanca, and I
Speaker 11: think that you just it's.
Speaker 7: There are that.
Speaker 11: Look, I'm not doing the best job of articulating this,
Speaker 11: but I think that people like whether it's Spielberger in
Speaker 11: the meantime, many filmmakers of the next succeeding generations. It's
Speaker 11: one of those movies that people have seen, they've talked about,
Speaker 11: and so it has a way of kind of cropping
Speaker 11: up and it does so as well win these sort
Speaker 11: of satirical cartoons it does. So it's Matt Sulman who's
Speaker 11: one of the writers on the Simpson he told me,
Speaker 11: and then I interviewed him as well. He said that
Speaker 11: he wasn't even sure he's actually ever seen the movie
Speaker 11: start to finish, but he could in the writer's room.
Speaker 11: He could riff on it and they would come up, both,
Speaker 11: let's put such a let's go drink it the well
Speaker 11: again of Casablanca. We get what's there's there? I think
Speaker 11: there's more to drink there. And so as you go
Speaker 11: back to it, because they you can spin off another
Speaker 11: thread of that Yon part. The subtitle is only slightly hyperbolic,
Speaker 11: which is the life legend in After Life Hollywood's most
Speaker 11: beloved movie, And I look, is it really the most
Speaker 11: I think in many precincts that it is. And and
Speaker 11: one of the things that makes it so widely beloved
Speaker 11: is that I think that it speaks to people. It
Speaker 11: speaks to people in all different ways. Umberto Echo when
Speaker 11: he was in Bologna with his sort of laboratory of Semutitians,
Speaker 11: of people who are studying the science of science. So
Speaker 11: they just went through as to use another sorry academic term,
Speaker 11: when it's unpacked all of these different archetypes and sort
Speaker 11: of layers of meeting these different figures, and through that
Speaker 11: lens you can just see why it is. As he
Speaker 11: puts it, it's not one movie, but it's movies. It's
Speaker 11: a movie that radiates moviness. And so it works well
Speaker 11: for Shorthand in that regard to you'll see a sort
Speaker 11: of a stray obviously, and play it against Sam. You've
Speaker 11: got all sorts of especially bogie posters, and there definitely
Speaker 11: must be one from Gass and Block, but there are
Speaker 11: other from a camera will track and you'll see on
Speaker 11: a wall and image there. In a way, it betrays
Speaker 11: a kind of synophilia or film geekdom, or whatever the
Speaker 11: hell you want to call it, on the part of
Speaker 11: whoever it is who's inhabiting that space or something. And
Speaker 11: so it works, I think nicely in that regard to
Speaker 11: we Obviously it's funny. So the book came out in
Speaker 11: twenty seventeen. That was for the seventy fifth. So five
Speaker 11: years later, fast forward to twenty twenty two, I'm doing
Speaker 11: all these interviews for the eightieth and it hasn't really
Speaker 11: lost steam, teach, and so I've talked with a lot
Speaker 11: of and I've got a nineteen year old myself and
Speaker 11: a fourteen year old. But I talked with a lot
Speaker 11: of young students, and even they like me when I
Speaker 11: was a teenager, when I rejected it, they overcome that,
Speaker 11: and they when watching it together, especially, which is the
Speaker 11: way I like to watch movies always, in the way
Speaker 11: I do in class, whenever possible, watch together. Suddenly they're
Speaker 11: seeing things too that they had never realized they heard
Speaker 11: people talk about, but Denver had realized, Aha, this is
Speaker 11: what they're actually referencing. And again, I think because of
Speaker 11: the I mentioned this sort of how economical it is.
Speaker 11: And I think that the critiz was one of the
Speaker 11: most proficient directors and prolific for that matter too, of
Speaker 11: his generation. But he, together with his DP, with his
Speaker 11: cameraman Arthur Edison, shot the Maltese Falcon just the previous
Speaker 11: year with John Houston his directorial debut. They it just
Speaker 11: it moves swiftly. It just moves swiftly from beginning to end.
Speaker 11: I think that for especially in this age of distraction
Speaker 11: and compression, it really it still works for audiences watching
Speaker 11: TikTok videos and vines or whatever the hell we watch
Speaker 11: these days, but still it moves so swiftly that you
Speaker 11: can really allow yourself to just be drawn in and
Speaker 11: swept up in its taken by the I don't know,
Speaker 11: undertow or something, but it was Jim Hoberman, who great critic,
Speaker 11: former critic of the Village Voice many years. He said
Speaker 11: that he when he would be at home and imagine
Speaker 11: probably TCM whatever turn of classic movies, which is really,
Speaker 11: if we want to be honest with ourselves, the Costa
Speaker 11: Blanca channels just always on. But he says, when you
Speaker 11: can step in at any point over the whatever is
Speaker 11: crisp one hundred and three minutes or whatever the runtime
Speaker 11: is of the film, and you just start from there.
Speaker 11: It doesn't matter where, what point timey, just you're in it.
Speaker 11: And that's also I think something special about the film.
Speaker 11: It definitely rewards repeat viewing that much. We know. Roger
Speaker 11: Ebert was famous for talking about that as well, and
Speaker 11: it was famous. Look in a way, it's not to
Speaker 11: the late great Ebert this notion of the beloved movie,
Speaker 11: because he was often asked, what is your favorite movie?
Speaker 11: And he always felt obliged to say, sure, if you're
Speaker 11: going to talk about craftsmanship and film form and master
Speaker 11: and so forth. Maybe it would be Citizen King, But
Speaker 11: he says, what's the movie that you really want to
Speaker 11: watch and enjoy watching. It's Casa Blanca.
Speaker 8: I'm messaid.
Speaker 11: Look, there's so many other fabulous movies, no doubt, but
Speaker 11: especially when talking about classical Hollywood and the sort of
Speaker 11: the holy grails of classical Hollywood. I think that's often
Speaker 11: whether it's an ambidious comparison or not, doesn't make it.
Speaker 11: Don't care about that bullshit, But I do think there's
Speaker 11: some credence to it in the sense, and I teach
Speaker 11: Kane it's hard not to. But it is a more
Speaker 11: pleasurable experience, I would argue, because it is not. We
Speaker 11: don't have Greg Tolan's camera shot at a low angle,
Speaker 11: placed the low angle behind the fireplace. You don't have
Speaker 11: this sort of almost neo expressionist touches with the mirror.
Speaker 11: You just don't have all of that, which is is
Speaker 11: brilliant and visually rich and stimulating. But Gossablanca is more
Speaker 11: about pulling you into It's what good old Jack Warner said,
Speaker 11: one of the three most precious ingredients of making movie story, story,
Speaker 11: and story, And I think that's it. It really privileges
Speaker 11: now narrative over the sort of the visual acrobatics that
Speaker 11: you have in a in a film like like Kine. Again, no, no,
Speaker 11: I'm not meaning in any way to disc Kaine. But
Speaker 11: Caine is much more about virtuosity, right than it is
Speaker 11: about story.
Speaker 8: The story.
Speaker 11: It's certainly well told, there's no question about that. But
Speaker 11: I think in the case of Gasablanca, it's really from
Speaker 11: beginning to end, all about that great story, that great
Speaker 11: old story.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 2: This time goes by, when you're some like a hot
Speaker 2: book comes out, will you come back and talk to
Speaker 2: me about it?
Speaker 11: Oh God, that's an easy one. Yes, all right, great
Speaker 11: with enormous pleasure, fantastic some fact the new as the
Speaker 11: Germans might say, Yes, with enormous coucha a lot of pleasure. Absolutely.
Speaker 11: I'm due to finish it up by the end of
Speaker 11: this calendar year. Let's see if I can hustle. I'm
Speaker 11: doing all that. I've got to get to that finish line.
Speaker 11: I got to get there.
Speaker 2: Noah, thank you so much for your time. This is
Speaker 2: a was such a pleasure talking with you.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 11: I appreciate, I salute you. I love what you do,
Speaker 11: so thank you. I feel it was a great honor
Speaker 11: and a pleasure. And now I'm like a repeat offender.
Speaker 11: I'm like, I'm one of the usual suspects.
Speaker 16: Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman, Let's go make a picture on
Speaker 16: the island of strongly, Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman, You're so purty.
Speaker 16: He'd make any email quiver, You'd make five fly from
Speaker 16: the creator, Ingrid Bergman.
Speaker 2: Mister Rody, what brought you to write about Michael Curtiz?
Speaker 7: I had written a biography of Charles McGraw with Looking
Speaker 7: Back was a long time ago, and that was an
Speaker 7: exercise in serhen diipity, and I was thinking about what
Speaker 7: should I do next. One of my friends was Dick
Speaker 7: erd Me, who came up through Warner Brothers, was one
Speaker 7: of the last people standing on that, and he recommended
Speaker 7: I was casting around and saying, I'm trying to think
Speaker 7: of something to write about, and he said, you need
Speaker 7: to write about Mike Curtiz. He was my champion. And
Speaker 7: then right around the same time, McGilligan reached out to me,
Speaker 7: a biographer who became a good mentor and a friend,
Speaker 7: and he said, you should write something about a director.
Speaker 7: Originally I thought of Jules Dason, because I had a
Speaker 7: correspondence with Dason, and I not only admired his movies
Speaker 7: very much, but I admired him as a person very much.
Speaker 7: He was in his nineties, and we sent several letters
Speaker 7: back and forth, and he would write in small font
Speaker 7: in print, these detailed responses to my kind of silly
Speaker 7: fanboy questions. Looking back in retrospect, but then and starting
Speaker 7: to think about Julie, I would have had to spend
Speaker 7: a lot of time in Greece. I would have had
Speaker 7: to spend a lot of time in France, and that
Speaker 7: wasn't really viable. So between those two things, I started
Speaker 7: researching Michael Krtiz, and I found out that there was
Speaker 7: a considerable amount of what I would call anecdotal mythology
Speaker 7: about the fact that he was a tyrant on the
Speaker 7: set and all these other things, but very little of
Speaker 7: anything substantive other than Andrew Saris in his book dismissing
Speaker 7: him Directors and Directions book that film geeks and film
Speaker 7: students carried around like holy scripture during the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 7: and he was dismissed by what I called the auteur
Speaker 7: school of film directors, which I go into in my
Speaker 7: book and take the opposite view of the autor theory.
Speaker 7: But in any event, that's how it started and it
Speaker 7: ended up. I was going to do something that was
Speaker 7: like two hundred and seventy five pages and two years,
Speaker 7: and it ended up being over seven hundred pages and
Speaker 7: six years. And it took me to Hungary, to Budapest,
Speaker 7: to all over the place, and I found grandchildren because
Speaker 7: he had I believe four or five different children by
Speaker 7: women who he was not married to, including his the
Speaker 7: mother of his last child, who I think is still
Speaker 7: with us, and certainly was still with us because I
Speaker 7: interviewed her, and he has a daughter that's younger than me,
Speaker 7: and that considering that this is a man born in
Speaker 7: eighteen eighty six. So any rate, that's how it started.
Speaker 7: So I would I would credit Pat McGilligan and Richard
Speaker 7: and Dick and my late really good pal for steering
Speaker 7: me towards Curtz. And I'm certainly in retrospect glad that
Speaker 7: they did.
Speaker 2: Now, I thought, you're trying to avoid traveled with the
Speaker 2: Dassin book, but here you are going to Budapest and
Speaker 2: all this for Curtiz.
Speaker 7: That kind of dovetail, that wasn't originally planned, but then
Speaker 7: I ended up going to the Portanoni Film Festival to
Speaker 7: speak at what they call the Presidium about Crites before Crtz,
Speaker 7: along with another author who had written a biography of
Speaker 7: Curtiz in Spanish. And so what I did was I
Speaker 7: dovetailed and went to Budapest first. And the trip from
Speaker 7: a time travel point of view turned out to be
Speaker 7: a nightmare, with canceled flights and coming back an engine
Speaker 7: caught on fire and we had to land in Paris
Speaker 7: and all of this relative melodrama of plane flights. But
Speaker 7: I was glad that it was able to be worked
Speaker 7: out because I got There is a film writer over
Speaker 7: in Buddhim best named Laslow Kristen, who I befriended, who
Speaker 7: was really invaluable to me because he went through one
Speaker 7: hundred year old magazines and discovered that a relative of
Speaker 7: Curtis was an editor of one of the movie magazines
Speaker 7: during the teen years in Budapest, and Curtes was written
Speaker 7: about in a lot of these magazines. In his films,
Speaker 7: he practically invented the film industry in Hungary and directed
Speaker 7: his first film in nineteen twelve when the director either
Speaker 7: got ill or quid and so forth. And I was
Speaker 7: able to go to the Cafe New York where all
Speaker 7: the show biz people hung out in the studio, and
Speaker 7: then I was able to go to the Hungarian Film
Speaker 7: r Guide in Budapest and they had all this Curtes
Speaker 7: material laid out, were very nice to me. So it
Speaker 7: was a very invaluable trip from that perspective.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me a little bit about his emigration,
Speaker 2: because he leaves Europe a lot earlier than a lot
Speaker 2: of other people who had to leave because of the
Speaker 2: is coming to power.
Speaker 7: He came to America originally in nineteen twenty six. He
Speaker 7: was directing a film for this Austrian count Colorat, who
Speaker 7: he made a lot of pictures for. He left Budapest.
Speaker 7: In Hungary after the nineteen nineteen revolution, you had a
Speaker 7: very short term communist regime that he was the motion
Speaker 7: picture pillar of that regime, although Curtiz was notoriously apolitical.
Speaker 7: But there was a counter revolution and the Nationalists took
Speaker 7: over and people were being arrested, and there was a
Speaker 7: colleague of as a director who was beaten to death
Speaker 7: and so forth, and a lot of the Hungarians, including
Speaker 7: Paul Lucas Abelle Leegosi famously said, I left there because
Speaker 7: I did not want to be part of a Necktai party.
Speaker 7: So Curtiz, Alexander Korda was arrested for a time, and
Speaker 7: then they all ended up in Austria working for an
Speaker 7: outfit called Sasha Films that was run by this count
Speaker 7: Colorad who basically turned Curtiz into an early version of
Speaker 7: the David o'celznik in Austra making these spectacles like Moon
Speaker 7: of Israel and Sodom and Gomora before that and so forth.
Speaker 7: So he was making a film in Paris with Lily
Speaker 7: Demita and Harry Warner came over on a talent search
Speaker 7: because Warner Brothers was starting They had started up their
Speaker 7: studio and was expanding, and Harry Warner ended up on
Speaker 7: the set and at first Curtiz said, who's this stranger?
Speaker 7: Get him off the set, and somebody said, this is
Speaker 7: mister Warner for America and he wants to talk to
Speaker 7: you about coming to America. So Curtiz came to America
Speaker 7: in nineteen twenty six. There's a fabulous story that he
Speaker 7: came in on an ocean liner during the fourth of
Speaker 7: July and all the fireworks were going off, and Harry
Speaker 7: Warner met him on the pier and Curtiz said, oh,
Speaker 7: you did all this for me, a celebration that everything,
Speaker 7: and that was written in studio biographies and written by
Speaker 7: Jack Warner in his notoriously inaccurate My First Thousand Years
Speaker 7: in al How Wallace turned out, Curtiz arrived in New
Speaker 7: York on June twenty six and not on the fourth
Speaker 7: of July. And it's another Hollywood story, but he came
Speaker 7: over to make this spectacle, Noah's Ark, and he got
Speaker 7: to Hollywood, took the train. This was the four Union
Speaker 7: Station was built. He ended up in the Central Station
Speaker 7: and that was when Warners had their studio on Sunset Boulevard,
Speaker 7: and he managed to get a street car there. Walked in.
Speaker 7: Jack Warner was getting the kinks worked out on massage table,
Speaker 7: and he says, I am here, I have my script
Speaker 7: for Noah's Ark, and Warner looked at it, tossed it aside,
Speaker 7: and he said, we're not going to do that. You're
Speaker 7: going to make something called The Third Degree about America
Speaker 7: crime and jurisprudence. Her taste couldn't even speak English, or
Speaker 7: read English or do anything so he quickly got the
Speaker 7: script translated somehow into Hungarian. He went down and talked
Speaker 7: with the under sheriff and watched lineups and fingerprinting and
Speaker 7: all of this procedure, and he directed the third degree.
Speaker 7: Hal Moore shot it for him, and he did a
Speaker 7: lot of tricks with the camera. He also incorporated all
Speaker 7: this circus stuff because he had been as a kid,
Speaker 7: he had been in a traveling circus back in Hungary.
Speaker 7: And Jack Warner always says, he said, Curtis made two pictures,
Speaker 7: a crime mystery and a circus picture which was in
Speaker 7: the script, and he did a lot of things with
Speaker 7: the camera because he was already a master with the camera.
Speaker 7: And the film was successful, and he stayed at Warner Brothers.
Speaker 7: What I did find out is his immigration status was
Speaker 7: really weird, because I think he came here on a
Speaker 7: WORPBZ and so on and so forth, and he didn't
Speaker 7: actually become a citizen I think until like nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 7: end of nineteen thirty five, and the Warners of course
Speaker 7: used that to control him. There was always a sense
Speaker 7: of fealty with Curtiz, and particularly Harry Warner, who he
Speaker 7: felt loyal to, for bringing him to America. But that
Speaker 7: was a way of keeping the leash taught. And when
Speaker 7: you look at some of these early contracts that he signed,
Speaker 7: I mean they even had control, like anything he thought
Speaker 7: of was the property of the studio. This is incredible.
Speaker 7: And if they wanted him to do anything regarding the
Speaker 7: studio or a movie, including sweeping up litter on a
Speaker 7: sound stage, he had to do it. These contracts back
Speaker 7: in the day of the studios were really in terms
Speaker 7: of intriment. But he found a home at Warner Brothers
Speaker 7: and was very successful there.
Speaker 2: As we all know well, he was cranking out these films,
Speaker 2: three four films a year. I can't even imagine you
Speaker 2: having to go through and find all of these movies,
Speaker 2: much less find the time to watch all of them.
Speaker 2: I under took his six years to do that.
Speaker 7: Yeah. I had to also write a complete filmography, which
Speaker 7: is in the back of the book, which was a
Speaker 7: very laborious exercise, but I felt I needed to do this,
Speaker 7: and he directed whole or in part, one hundred and
Speaker 7: eighty one movies. It's just absolutely incredible. And at the
Speaker 7: last minute it was brought to my attention by one
Speaker 7: of my friends at the Hungarian Film Archive. When the
Speaker 7: Emperor of France, Joseph died and they had a temporary
Speaker 7: emperor before World War One blew up the Austrian Hungarian Empire.
Speaker 7: There's the coronation of the new emperor, and they're all
Speaker 7: marching in Budapest and they're filming this street, and then
Speaker 7: all of a sudden you see Curtiz look around and
Speaker 7: look at the camera. And so he was filming the
Speaker 7: coronation of the new Emperor in Austria Hungary. So I
Speaker 7: had to add that right at the end of the
Speaker 7: book as a credit. And there may be I'm sure
Speaker 7: there are other films that he had something involved with
Speaker 7: directing that haven't surfaced, because so many of his early
Speaker 7: films that he did he directed I think like upwards
Speaker 7: of eighty films on the continent before he even came
Speaker 7: to the United States and worked for Warner Brothers. He
Speaker 7: as I said in the preface, I think paraphrasing my
Speaker 7: own words, but there was a belief also considered the
Speaker 7: European man's prerogative of sex was something like breathing or eating.
Speaker 7: So his thing was he liked the fuck and he
Speaker 7: liked the direct movies, not in that order, and he
Speaker 7: liked the skeet shoot, and he was a great polo
Speaker 7: player and had a great estate here in Woodland Hills,
Speaker 7: actually very close by to where I live, and had
Speaker 7: like a two hundred and fifty acre estate back when
Speaker 7: the San Fernando Valley was a two hundred and thirty
Speaker 7: square mile of Canilo feel than chicken ranches, and a
Speaker 7: lot of movie star estates. And he had a polo field,
Speaker 7: a skeat shooting range, a studio for his wife, bes Meredith,
Speaker 7: and he married best Meredith, I think in twenty nine,
Speaker 7: but they were together and he met her. I think
Speaker 7: she worked on the script of The Third Degree, and
Speaker 7: she was a founding member of the Motion Picture Academy.
Speaker 7: She wrote the scenario for The Silent Ben Herb. So
Speaker 7: she started out to be a lot more well known
Speaker 7: in the American film community than Michael Curtiz, and their
Speaker 7: marriage endured. It was far from a conventional marriage. It
Speaker 7: was more of a professional partnership. And one of the
Speaker 7: things I do bring out in the book is that
Speaker 7: Michael Curtiz's career would not have been the same without her,
Speaker 7: because her council on studio politics, on scripts and so
Speaker 7: on and so forth, particularly during the early years, was
Speaker 7: invaluable and really shaped his career.
Speaker 2: You've mentioned where you're at, and I'm over here in Detroit.
Speaker 2: And with Detroit we had The Black Legion. And I
Speaker 2: think I've read that Tea's directed part of The Black Legion.
Speaker 2: What does the story with that if.
Speaker 7: You remember, Yeah, he directed the courtroom scenes and boat
Speaker 7: art in jail at the end of that movie. And
Speaker 7: the director of that, yeah, Archie mails that Black Legion
Speaker 7: was such a controversial film that I found a memo
Speaker 7: from the executive producer Hal Wallace to Archie Mail saying, Hey,
Speaker 7: this is very controversial. If you don't want your name
Speaker 7: on the film, let me know. And so what would
Speaker 7: happen is Curtis was really the Swiss Army Knife of
Speaker 7: directors at Water Brothers. So when someone would go on vacation,
Speaker 7: someone would get sick, or they'd have to go back
Speaker 7: and do retakes, Curtines was always there, willing to work.
Speaker 7: He never said no, and so he directed the courtroom scenes.
Speaker 7: At the end of the climax of that were Buguard
Speaker 7: and the whole Black Legion gang is brought in. And
Speaker 7: I can't remember whether it's either seems like all those movies,
Speaker 7: the judge was either Samuel S. Hines or Henry O'Neal
Speaker 7: as the district attorney. But at the end and then
Speaker 7: Bogart is in his cell regretting everything that transpired during
Speaker 7: the balance of the film, and so on and so forth,
Speaker 7: and you had a nice, tidy, happy ending. But I
Speaker 7: do have to say that the Warner Brothers were the
Speaker 7: only studio that would make a film like that during
Speaker 7: those days, and of course scrupulously there had no mention
Speaker 7: of although it was a kate k thing, it was
Speaker 7: all aimed at foreigners. You didn't see anybody of color
Speaker 7: in a movie at Warner Brothers in nineteen thirty seven
Speaker 7: unless they were doing something racially stereotypical, like shining shoes
Speaker 7: or something like that. But taking that in the context
Speaker 7: of its time, Warner Brothers was the first studio to
Speaker 7: come out for square against the Nazis during the nineteenth thirties,
Speaker 7: and this was when LB Mayer was giving Goebels staff
Speaker 7: tours of MGM because the other studios did not want
Speaker 7: to lose the German marketing. And in fact, the last
Speaker 7: Warner Brothers film that was shown in Germany until the
Speaker 7: war ended. Was I was a fugitive from a chain gang,
Speaker 7: which was made in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 2: Nineteen forty two. It seems like it was a huge
Speaker 2: year for Curtiz, just with obviously Casablanca, which I would
Speaker 2: like to talk a little bit more about, but of
Speaker 2: course Yankee Doodle Dandy. I freaking love Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Speaker 2: and what a different You couldn't get two more different
Speaker 2: films from Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and don't forget Captains of the Clouds exactly. Those
Speaker 7: were the three pictures those years. But I think Yankee
Speaker 7: Doodle Dandy, starting with that was the happiest time he
Speaker 7: ever had a Warner Brothers for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 7: Number one, Curtiz was a very patriotic American, and one
Speaker 7: should be aware that this was somebody who was Jewish
Speaker 7: that grew up under being governed by an emperor. I'll
Speaker 7: think about that, and had experienced anti Semitism. At the
Speaker 7: time of Yankee Doodle Dandy, he was trying to get
Speaker 7: his mother and two of his brothers out of Hungary.
Speaker 7: He was very patriotic about America and it was a
Speaker 7: very genuine feeling. And I think part of Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Speaker 7: where Cagney is George M. Cohan is touring in Baudeville
Speaker 7: with his parents. My father, thanks you, my mother, thanks you.
Speaker 7: All of that took Kurt back to his days of
Speaker 7: touring in the provinces in Austria Hungary with a theatrical group.
Speaker 7: Although he could be very tough on concertain actor Jersey,
Speaker 7: he was also a very sentimental, emotional person. Cagney had
Speaker 7: become a major star. Going back to Public Enemy in
Speaker 7: nineteen thirty one, there was a series of quarrels that
Speaker 7: he had with Jack Warner. Cagney grew up in New York.
Speaker 7: He spoke fluent Yiddish and his name for Jack Warner
Speaker 7: was the swonse. I will let your audience translate that word.
Speaker 7: But there was a series of suspensions lawsuits. Cagney left
Speaker 7: for a while and made pictures with an independent studio,
Speaker 7: but since the major studios had distribution and had their
Speaker 7: theater change locked up, they really didn't do much. So
Speaker 7: Jack Warner ended up wanting him back because his pictures
Speaker 7: in Cagney. This was the star system and Cagney was
Speaker 7: money in the Bank. So in nineteen thirty eight, Cagney
Speaker 7: returned for the second time to Warner Brothers, and he
Speaker 7: had quite a contract where he had his brother as
Speaker 7: associate producer under Wallace, he had script approval a lot
Speaker 7: of things, and he also had what was then revolutionary
Speaker 7: called a happiness clause, where if he was unhappy, he
Speaker 7: could just declare his contract null and voidn't leave. So
Speaker 7: nobody really had that power that Cagney had in nineteen
Speaker 7: thirty eight. And when he made Yankee Doodle Dandy, Curtiz
Speaker 7: was directing, and by that time they had worked together
Speaker 7: on several films, and Curtes knew better than to try
Speaker 7: to tell James Cagney how to act. And James Cagney
Speaker 7: was not going to tell Curtiz how to block off
Speaker 7: the scene and move the camera or construct sets or
Speaker 7: any of that stuff. So they were very simpatico, and
Speaker 7: of course Cagney didn't take any crap off Curtiz. In fact,
Speaker 7: then he told John mccaid for he said, he said,
Speaker 7: Mike didn't know how to treat actors, but he sure
Speaker 7: as hell knew how to treat a camera, and he
Speaker 7: couldn't need photograph and do everything with a camera that
Speaker 7: needed to be done, and if you got through a
Speaker 7: picture with him, you knew it was going to be
Speaker 7: well done. But he didn't know how to treat actors,
Speaker 7: but he knew how to treat me, because if he didn't,
Speaker 7: he knew I'd knock him on ass. That was cagnate.
Speaker 7: But so they got along, and you had Jimmy Howe
Speaker 7: behind the camera and so forth, and Wallace started. Wallace
Speaker 7: was a great producer, there's no one of the great
Speaker 7: Hollywood producers. But he was a micromanager to the extreme.
Speaker 7: And the Cagney and his brother Bill really resented how
Speaker 7: Wallace because they saw him as a front office shill
Speaker 7: for Jack Warner and meddling and micromanaging, and they started, this,
Speaker 7: are you going to use a horse in this scene?
Speaker 7: And I think you should do this. So Cagney just said,
Speaker 7: I think after this picture's over, I'm going to leave
Speaker 7: Warner brothers. And so Wallace and Warner backed off, and
Speaker 7: they essentially let James Cagney and Michael Cartiz make the
Speaker 7: picture and left them alone. And one of the great
Speaker 7: stories about Yankee Doodle Dandy is the first day of
Speaker 7: shooting was December eighth, nineteen forty one, the day after
Speaker 7: Pearl Harbor and Joan said that they were all gathered
Speaker 7: around the radio on the soundstage, Walter Houston, Gene Cagney, Joan, etc.
Speaker 7: Listening to President Roosevelt's speech to Congress asking for a
Speaker 7: declaration of war and the famous Day of Infamy speech,
Speaker 7: and then Cagney and Curtiz walk in and Cagney said,
Speaker 7: I think we should turn that radio off. I think
Speaker 7: a prayer goes in here, and everyone there was a
Speaker 7: moment of silence, and then Critiz said, well, boys and girls,
Speaker 7: we have very sad times, very troubled times, so we
Speaker 7: do have a great story to tell, so let us
Speaker 7: make this movie. And so they did with that, Yankee
Speaker 7: Doodle Dandy became one of the biggest hits in the
Speaker 7: history of Warner Brothers. It won Cagney as Oscar. I
Speaker 7: think Curtiz was nominated and didn't win for Best Director.
Speaker 7: He was nominated for Four Daughters, Captain Blood, Four Daughters,
Speaker 7: Angels with Dirty Faces and as he said, always the bride'smaid,
Speaker 7: never the mother, and winning the Oscar so in any event,
Speaker 7: then came Casablanca after that, which is a film that's
Speaker 7: been written about, and I gave it its own chapter
Speaker 7: in about forty odd pages, and I called it Fundamental Things.
Speaker 7: And I tried to write and discuss Cosa Blanca from
Speaker 7: the perspective of Michael Curtiz and what he did with
Speaker 7: that film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm curious what his experience was on there, because
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people give a lot of
Speaker 2: credit to Hal Wallace. A lot of people then try
Speaker 2: to spread out the credit to the whole ensemble that
Speaker 2: comes together. And I'm curious what your take is as
Speaker 2: far as what Purtiz's role was in the success of Casablanca.
Speaker 7: There's a couple of things that he did that were significant.
Speaker 7: One of the things he did was insist that there
Speaker 7: was a basis for rit blame Humphrey Bogart's going off
Speaker 7: the rails when Ingrid bergmanship, because there was no basis
Speaker 7: in the original script for the love story. And he
Speaker 7: was the one that insisted that the love story include
Speaker 7: the flashback and when they were in Paris and the
Speaker 7: Champagne being opened and all of that other business. One
Speaker 7: of the other things Curtiz did is he insisted on
Speaker 7: casting his fellow countryman SZ cuddles Zacal whose real name
Speaker 7: was Jacob Garro, and he was a Hungarian music hall
Speaker 7: comedian an actor and they knew each other from way
Speaker 7: way back in the day, back in Budapest, and he
Speaker 7: really created Zcal's humor. He thought that Zakal, as Carl
Speaker 7: the manager of Rix, would add that to the film,
Speaker 7: and he was absolutely right. And it turned into, as usual,
Speaker 7: a financial deal because Sekal was asking for more money
Speaker 7: than how Wallace was willing to pay him, and so
Speaker 7: he essentially said, if you want ce Cow, you're going
Speaker 7: to have to convince him to take less. And so
Speaker 7: Curtiz got involved in that situation and mollified Wallace and
Speaker 7: mollified the Cows. And if you watch the movie, Zakal
Speaker 7: has one of the major parts aside from the principles
Speaker 7: in the movie, and his humor does lighten things out,
Speaker 7: and so that was important. Of course, Curtiza's worked with
Speaker 7: the camera with the flashback, with the smoke of the cigarette,
Speaker 7: the ending when vishy water gets tossed in the trash tents,
Speaker 7: and just that opening scene when they go into Rix,
Speaker 7: and that long tracking shot and you see this what
Speaker 7: I call the choreography of bustle, and then all the
Speaker 7: character actors going from table to table trying to figure
Speaker 7: out how to get out of Casa Blanco, all these
Speaker 7: European refugees. And the amazing thing was or not so amazing,
Speaker 7: was that most of these people that played these small
Speaker 7: bits parts were Jewish refugees and they were personally cast
Speaker 7: by Curtiz. So when you see the scene of La
Speaker 7: Marseille and people crying, Dan Seymour, who was the massive
Speaker 7: character actor, who was the doorman going into the casino,
Speaker 7: who ended up being used in a lot of Fritz
Speaker 7: Lang's movies and ended up being Fritz Lang's estate executor.
Speaker 7: Believe it or not, dan Seymour said, he looked around
Speaker 7: and he said, those tears were legitimate with people. And
Speaker 7: I go into a lot of detail about the different people,
Speaker 7: Mister and missus Lutsch tag Elka Groening was a refugee
Speaker 7: from that and Ludwig Stussel, who was distantly related to me,
Speaker 7: who ended up doing commercials in the nineteen sixties for
Speaker 7: Italian Swiss colony wine wearing Leat knows that little old
Speaker 7: winemaker me. Curtiz cast all these people, and also for
Speaker 7: someone who was supposed to be notoriously hard hearted. One
Speaker 7: of the teamsters that knew if a colleague of mine
Speaker 7: who worked there for years, said Curtiz would always hire
Speaker 7: all these bid actors and extras, particularly during Christmas, to
Speaker 7: make sure that they got paid and they got some
Speaker 7: Christmas money, and so on and so forth. And if
Speaker 7: you look through the production files on Cosa Blanca, Wallace
Speaker 7: was always trying to get him to let certain actors
Speaker 7: go so they wouldn't have to keep paying them. And
Speaker 7: Curtiz would always connive to keep people on the payroll
Speaker 7: as long as possible. And in fact, I think that
Speaker 7: he had Sydney green Street there for a long period
Speaker 7: of time, and Sydney green Street was getting almost three
Speaker 7: thousand dollars a week. He was very well paid. And
Speaker 7: of course Wallace would get apoplectic. Wallace could squeeze a
Speaker 7: nickel hard enough to make the buffalo collapse in the crowd.
Speaker 7: Cosablanca would not be what it became and what it
Speaker 7: still is without Michael Curtiz and Julius Epstein. The Epstein's
Speaker 7: and Howard Kotch wrote the Balance of the script, said
Speaker 7: that he wished he could have recorded some of the
Speaker 7: script conferences where Curtiz would say, oh, you know, and
Speaker 7: then he scratched his head and he says, oh, I
Speaker 7: forgot what Beskie told me last night. In other words,
Speaker 7: he was going over the script with best Meredith and
Speaker 7: she told him something and he had to try to
Speaker 7: remember what he was told and so on and so forth.
Speaker 7: But yeah, he was that. And Curtiz always gave credit
Speaker 7: to Hal Wallace for Casa Blanca because the script was
Speaker 7: a work in progress during the movie, which is not
Speaker 7: the way how Wallace and Warner Brothers and Curtiz liked
Speaker 7: to make movies, but that was how it happened. And
Speaker 7: one of the interesting things is the ending of Casa Blanca,
Speaker 7: where who is ingwd Bergmann going to go away with
Speaker 7: and so on and so forth. And Bergman always said,
Speaker 7: I didn't know whether I was going to stay with
Speaker 7: Bogar or leave with Paul Henry, her husband. She probably
Speaker 7: believed that, but there was no way that she was
Speaker 7: going to abandon her noble husband to go off with
Speaker 7: her boyfriend who was a bartender. That wasn't going to
Speaker 7: happen in terms of the censor's office, in terms of
Speaker 7: the audience, in terms of anything. So it was like,
Speaker 7: how are we going to make sure that she goes
Speaker 7: away with her husband? And on the last day of
Speaker 7: that there was a violent argument between Humphrey Bogart and Kurtiz,
Speaker 7: so much so that how Wallace had to come down
Speaker 7: to the set to arbitrary. And Wallace rarely visited the
Speaker 7: set of his movies. I think he had three or
Speaker 7: four movies in production at the same time, so he
Speaker 7: didn't have time to go down to the set and
Speaker 7: hold hands with directors or actors or any of that.
Speaker 7: But he had to go with this, and what actually
Speaker 7: transpired has been lost to history. Kurtiz's last significant other
Speaker 7: told me that it was about how the scene was
Speaker 7: to be played. Also, Bogart did have a habit that
Speaker 7: was revealed later on of where he would come in
Speaker 7: the morning and not know his lines, so he would
Speaker 7: stall around to come up with some reason where he
Speaker 7: could take some more extra time to learn his lines.
Speaker 7: Maybe that was the reason, we don't know, but eventually
Speaker 7: the argument was settled. And the whole thing about doing
Speaker 7: the greater good by staying with her husband and you're
Speaker 7: the person that keeps them going, and his work and
Speaker 7: the war and the problems of two little people don't
Speaker 7: amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,
Speaker 7: and that was the perfect coda, and they came up
Speaker 7: with the right way to end the movie.
Speaker 2: Apparently they managed to patch it up or whatever, because
Speaker 2: I know they worked again pretty soon thereafter with pastors
Speaker 2: to Marseille.
Speaker 7: Bogart was not loved, but he was definitely respected. And
Speaker 7: when Bogart signed his last contract with Warner Brothers in
Speaker 7: forty six, his contract specified these are the directors who
Speaker 7: can direct me, and I believe that list was John Houston,
Speaker 7: of course, Delmer Daves, John Cromwell and Michael Curtise and
Speaker 7: John Promo went back to directing Bogart on Broadway back
Speaker 7: in his early days, and they were friends, and John
Speaker 7: Cromwell was a good director, was Warner Brothers top director.
Speaker 7: So Bogart was not going to do that. But Bogart
Speaker 7: did not like the way Curtiz could be mean to
Speaker 7: quote unquote the little people and be dismissive, and sometimes
Speaker 7: he would use big players as a way to vent
Speaker 7: pressure because the pressure that he was put under by
Speaker 7: Wallace and Jack Warner. Jack Warner, I think his contribution
Speaker 7: to the pictures he made during the nineteen forties could
Speaker 7: be summed up in two words, and those are hurry up,
Speaker 7: you're shooting too many angles? Why are you taking so long?
Speaker 7: Why are you doing this? And before every movie he
Speaker 7: would send the letter, oh, I know this is going
Speaker 7: to be a bigger hip than the last one. And
Speaker 7: the pressure that was under for the most part, he
Speaker 7: sloughed it off. But one of the things I found
Speaker 7: in writing this book was that you had people previously
Speaker 7: wrote off Curtiz as a vocational mechanic of the studio system.
Speaker 7: We just shot the script. And by the contrary, he
Speaker 7: would agree with Wallace to do whatever Wallace wanted. Then
Speaker 7: he'd go down to the set, he drop or change dialogue,
Speaker 7: try to add sets, change wardrobe, and he, particularly in
Speaker 7: the thirties, drove Wallace round the bend with some of
Speaker 7: these the tuper production memos, particularly during Captain Blood and
Speaker 7: Charge of the Light Brigade. Wallace almost fired him off
Speaker 7: of that because he would Curtes would do whatever Wallace
Speaker 7: wanted to see clean lines of soldiers and arrow Flynn
Speaker 7: in his uniform, and Curtiz was using four ground pieces
Speaker 7: of a water wheel turning and all of this. You
Speaker 7: know what I would call artsy FARTSI stuff, and he
Speaker 7: and Wallace really bumped heads, but they came to an accommodation,
Speaker 7: and as it turned down, Wallace and Curtis became very
Speaker 7: close friends because they were both totally the OCD, obsessive,
Speaker 7: compulsive people about movie making, and they shared that. And
Speaker 7: they also loved horses, and Critiz kept Wallace's horse, Freckles,
Speaker 7: out at his ranch and they went riding together and
Speaker 7: so forth, and they became very close. And in fact,
Speaker 7: near the end of his career in the seventies, Wallace
Speaker 7: was a guest at AFI where young filmmakers they'd have
Speaker 7: people like Billy Weiler and Wallace so forth to come
Speaker 7: into the students and somebody said to Wallace, you didn't
Speaker 7: have very many great directors and Warner brothers like Curtiz,
Speaker 7: and Wallace got pissed off and he said, I don't
Speaker 7: think you know what you're talking about. Michael Curtiz was
Speaker 7: one of the great directors, and it stole him because
Speaker 7: Al Wallace's legacy as a producer was tied to Curtiz's
Speaker 7: legacy as a director. They were, as I wrote, they
Speaker 7: were the yin and yang of Warner Bay.
Speaker 2: You watched all of these movies, and we talked a
Speaker 2: little bit about the autur theory at the beginning. What
Speaker 2: were those patterns and those shots and things you already mentioned,
Speaker 2: like the waterwheel on the foreground. I did notice a
Speaker 2: lot of foreground background things, even just in Casablanca, the
Speaker 2: moving camera. What are those things that you saw that
Speaker 2: he would like to employ during his films.
Speaker 7: He loved subtlety, and he liked to move the camera,
Speaker 7: but he didn't do it for the camera's sake. He
Speaker 7: did it for the story's sake. If you watch Purtiz's movie,
Speaker 7: the use of mirror, so many movies there's always one
Speaker 7: shot where someone that moves and you see something take
Speaker 7: place in a mirror and then it switches. But he
Speaker 7: was not a meat and potatoes guy. In fact, Curtiz
Speaker 7: was in his part where he was an artistic man.
Speaker 7: And in fact, Jimmy Leighton who was in Life with
Speaker 7: Father and I think he was the one courting Elizabeth Taylor.
Speaker 7: He said, Mike arranged every camera setup. He said, the
Speaker 7: dop didn't do it, Mike did it. You know, he
Speaker 7: arranged all the camera setups and so on and so forth.
Speaker 7: He knew instinctively because he was an actor. He started
Speaker 7: out as an actor in Budapest, and he understood acting
Speaker 7: and so on and so forth. What he didn't have
Speaker 7: patience with is prima donnas. Again, he didn't get along
Speaker 7: with Betty Davis at all because Betty Davis, they called
Speaker 7: her the fourth Warner brother, and Betty Davis was about
Speaker 7: Betty Davis in a lot of cases. She was a
Speaker 7: great actor, but she always felt, Curtis isn't paying enough
Speaker 7: attention to me, He's paying too much attention to the
Speaker 7: camera and so forth. And when he directed Joan Crawford
Speaker 7: and Mildred Pierce that she went on the Oscar for
Speaker 7: and it broke her down because he viewed her as
Speaker 7: a poor substitute for Barbara Stanwick, who he wanted, and
Speaker 7: he thought that she was an MGM pretty girl with
Speaker 7: shoulder pads and everything. And as Crawford said, he gave
Speaker 7: me a postgraduate course in humiliation and then he started
Speaker 7: training me, and she ended up becoming very loyal and
Speaker 7: very appreciative of him because he knew what he was doing.
Speaker 7: He knew what he was doing, and he ended up
Speaker 7: respecting Crawford a lot because Crawford was about making the
Speaker 7: picture better, not just making herself better, a key difference
Speaker 7: between say Bert Lancaster and Kirk Douglas back in their day.
Speaker 7: So he did things with the camera. He did inventive
Speaker 7: things like if you watch The Breaking Point, which I
Speaker 7: think is his greatest post World War Two movie after
Speaker 7: nineteen forty five, and the ending of the Breaking Point
Speaker 7: where you have Wana Hornazz's son by himself and the
Speaker 7: pier looking for a father who he doesn't know has
Speaker 7: been murdered, and how the crane shot pulls back. I mean,
Speaker 7: that ending would make a stone cry. It's just unbelievable.
Speaker 7: So he knew actors, he knew what to get from
Speaker 7: a script. He could take a bad script and make
Speaker 7: it better, which I think is the sign of a
Speaker 7: great director. But he made so many movies, not all
Speaker 7: of them can be great movie. He was particularly in
Speaker 7: Warner Brothers in the twenties and thirties. He was a
Speaker 7: contract director and they would tell him go make this,
Speaker 7: and so he would to do the best that he can.
Speaker 7: And some of those movies are really really good, and
Speaker 7: some of them are like, well, you know, the runtime
Speaker 7: is sixty one minutes and it's a programmer and so
Speaker 7: on and so forth. But when he became really successful,
Speaker 7: I think his real breakout picture was Captain Blood with
Speaker 7: the spectacle and everything. And he needed pictures. You know
Speaker 7: that old cliche, You're only as good as your last picture.
Speaker 7: The only way in Hollywood then and now to keep
Speaker 7: making movies is your movies have to make money, have
Speaker 7: to be successful. That's a fact, and so his movies were.
Speaker 7: He became like the cash cow of Warner Brothers from
Speaker 7: like the mid thirties through most of the forties, and
Speaker 7: then after the war was over and after nineteen forty six,
Speaker 7: the box office tanked. These studios were going to lose
Speaker 7: the control of their theater chains through the anti Trust
Speaker 7: Divesseger decision. And then you had the Blacklist, which ruled
Speaker 7: out swaths of probably the most talented people in Hollywood
Speaker 7: because of politics and so forth. And that was rice.
Speaker 7: He prevailed on Jack Warner to start his own production company,
Speaker 7: and unfortunately, for a number of reasons, his production company
Speaker 7: was temporarily successful. He made The Unsuspected, which was didn't
Speaker 7: lose money. He wanted to make something along the lines
Speaker 7: of Laura, and it didn't come up with that. In
Speaker 7: that particular movie, Curtiz did more with the camera and
Speaker 7: Woody Burdrell and Critiz go crazy with the camera in
Speaker 7: that movie. That's that's one of the great visual film
Speaker 7: More movies is the Unsuspected, The plotting of a head scratcher,
Speaker 7: but the visualists is really great. But then he discovered
Speaker 7: and signed Doris Day and made a Romance on the
Speaker 7: High Seas, My Dream Is Yours, and then A Flamingo Road,
Speaker 7: which was the most successful picture coming out of his
Speaker 7: production company, which I just showed last Saturday at the
Speaker 7: Egyptian Theater for Noir City. But it was not the time.
Speaker 7: First off, Critiz was an artistic man, he was not
Speaker 7: a businessman, and it was a bad time for movie
Speaker 7: box office generally. And then of course Jack Warner pioneered
Speaker 7: creative bookkeeping and charging off stuff to Curtiz's company and
Speaker 7: all this other stuff, and then envy he wanted to
Speaker 7: get Doris Day under Warner Brothers contract, not Michael Curtz Productions,
Speaker 7: and I write all about how that transpired. So Curtiz
Speaker 7: went back to being a contract director. He had right
Speaker 7: a refusal, but of course Jack Warner reviewed anyone that
Speaker 7: worked for him as someone and Ben Hurr chained to
Speaker 7: an oer more or less, you know, go back to
Speaker 7: your forty one and you know, I know you refuse this,
Speaker 7: Michael Curtiz, but I want you to make it, So
Speaker 7: go make this anyway. So he had. He still had
Speaker 7: to make some pictures he didn't want to make, and
Speaker 7: the ones he did want to make took too long.
Speaker 7: Like he really wanted to make the Will Rogers biopick,
Speaker 7: but that went on for years. Originally it was going
Speaker 7: to be made with Mark Hellinger producing it and so
Speaker 7: on and so forth, and nobody. The actors who knew
Speaker 7: Rodgers and redeared him were horrified at the idea of
Speaker 7: flying Will Rogers. Fencer Tracy said no way. Gary Cooper
Speaker 7: and Joel McCrae told him, I'm not going to do this.
Speaker 7: I'm a good man at a horse on a horse.
Speaker 7: I cannot play Will Rogers. And so finally he got
Speaker 7: Will Rogers son, Will Rogers Junior to play the role.
Speaker 7: And he doesn't do too bad. I mean, this was
Speaker 7: somebody who was not an actor, and Curtize actually got
Speaker 7: a credible performance. But the problem was by nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 7: Rogers had been dead since nineteen thirty five, and this
Speaker 7: most famous and revered of Americans people had forgotten and
Speaker 7: moved on. And so the film is very handsome. It's
Speaker 7: not bad. It sure made Harry Warner happy, but it
Speaker 7: didn't it. But I think if they had made that
Speaker 7: movie like in nineteen forty three, it would have been
Speaker 7: much much more of a hit than it turned out
Speaker 7: to be. And then finally he left Warner Brothers in
Speaker 7: fifty three because the creative bookkeeping, you know, oh, none
Speaker 7: of your pictures except for one made one well that
Speaker 7: was blowny and that was Warner Brothers. And there was that,
Speaker 7: and then there was also a lot of people had
Speaker 7: left that he was comfortable with, and this his brother
Speaker 7: David or though he had been a second unit director
Speaker 7: there and had done good work and so forth, and
Speaker 7: he was also billed as David C. Gardner. I think
Speaker 7: he changed his name either at the behest of his
Speaker 7: older brother, to make himself different and not feel that
Speaker 7: it was nepotism. But Deso Curtiz was the ad and
Speaker 7: the breaking point on The Enforcer did good work, and
Speaker 7: Warner Brothers was going to cut his brother loose. His
Speaker 7: attitude was, hey, I've been here I've been loyal to
Speaker 7: you all these years and you're treating my brother this way.
Speaker 7: And so, long story short, he left his last movie
Speaker 7: at Warner Brothers, The Boy from Oklahoma, which was another
Speaker 7: stupid title that Jack Warner came up. Will Rogers Junior
Speaker 7: was the hero. He wasn't a boy. Jack Warner was
Speaker 7: very proprietary when it came to contracts, publicity and the
Speaker 7: title of films, and he insisted on this, and so
Speaker 7: Curtiz left and he went to Paramount on a term contract.
Speaker 7: But then he directed The Egyptian for his old producer
Speaker 7: and good friend Darryl Zanik, and that was a spectacle. Unfortunately,
Speaker 7: Xanik insisted on using his mistress in one of the
Speaker 7: main roles who could not act, and he's took his
Speaker 7: mistress and cast her as Queen Nevertidy. It's still there,
Speaker 7: you have it. But his post war movies were a
Speaker 7: lot of people have written off that part of his career.
Speaker 7: But there's films like King Creole, which I think is
Speaker 7: clearly Elvis's best film, and The Proud Rebel with Alan Ladd,
Speaker 7: Olivia Davil and my buddy David Ladd who plays Alan,
Speaker 7: who is Alan Ladd's son in place his son in
Speaker 7: the movie. He did do some good work, and of
Speaker 7: course White Christmas, which was the biggest hit I think
Speaker 7: in terms of box office that Curtiz ever directed. Unfortunately,
Speaker 7: he did not have a percentage of the film. Bing
Speaker 7: Crosby of course did, and Irving Berlin did, and they
Speaker 7: had to give it to Danny k because I think
Speaker 7: Donald O'Connor got sick and they needed someone of equal heft,
Speaker 7: so they gave Danny. But Critique got a nice salary,
Speaker 7: but he did not at a piece of that movie.
Speaker 7: He would have been in good shape.
Speaker 2: So I know you mentioned Noir City, and I know
Speaker 2: that's going on right now, and there's different noir events
Speaker 2: throughout the rest of the year as we'll go into
Speaker 2: next year, which is fantastic. What else are you working on?
Speaker 7: I have an appearance. I'm going up to the I
Speaker 7: think it's the Vista Rio Theater in Sonoma County to
Speaker 7: host a weekend of film noir, I think April tenth
Speaker 7: through the fourteenth. And then there's the TCM Classic Film
Speaker 7: Festival here in Hollywood, I think the third weekend of April,
Speaker 7: and then I have my festival that I program and
Speaker 7: host at the Palm Springs Cultural Center in Palm Springs,
Speaker 7: it's called the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival. And I
Speaker 7: started out way back in two thousand and one assisting
Speaker 7: Arthur with the festival, and when he passed on in
Speaker 7: two thousand and eight, I took over for the programming
Speaker 7: and hosting. So I'm going to have Rory Flynn Errow
Speaker 7: Flynn's daughter there. I'm going to have my friend Wyatt
Speaker 7: McCrae for one of his grandfather Joel McCrae film, The Unseen,
Speaker 7: And I am scheduled on Sunday to do a special
Speaker 7: screening of the twenty twenty one version of Nightmare Alley
Speaker 7: and have the director mL del Toro and my friend
Speaker 7: his wife, the screenwriter Kim Morgan. There, so thirteen films
Speaker 7: over Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, May eighth through the eleventh.
Speaker 7: The best way to celebrate Mother's Day in Palm Springs.
Speaker 7: So doing. I'm working on another short book about a
Speaker 7: Western movie for the University Press of New Mexico that
Speaker 7: I have to deliver before the end of the year,
Speaker 7: and then after that we'll.
Speaker 2: See mister ROADI thank you so much.
Speaker 7: For your time.
Speaker 2: It was such a pleasure finally getting to speak with you.
Speaker 2: I've been a fan of your work for years.
Speaker 7: Well, thank you, Mike. And it's allan jettison that turn
Speaker 7: when I got out of the Navy long ago. You
Speaker 7: don't have to mister roade in me. But no, Mike,
Speaker 7: it's been a great talking to you, and I appreciate
Speaker 7: your podcast, and I hope one of these days we
Speaker 7: can meet up at the movies.
Speaker 9: The time is now, the beat is Hollywood, the heat
Speaker 9: is a discount thirty two.
Speaker 7: The skirts are.
Speaker 9: Blonde, brunettes and redhead I'm not there, but the prize
Speaker 9: is sapphire blue. In a world of illusion where the
Speaker 9: danger is real, it takes a cool headed private eye
Speaker 9: to solve a red hot mister XP, it's a case
Speaker 9: for an expert, and there's only one man who has
Speaker 9: what it takes to crack it in. The man with
Speaker 9: the Bogart's face.
Speaker 12: Did I see sometime on television and.
Speaker 2: All the movies?
Speaker 7: Now that's somebody else.
Speaker 2: You sure look like you?
Speaker 7: Now I look like him.
Speaker 9: A claw from a stranger, sham Marlow There, I need
Speaker 9: your help.
Speaker 1: I get two hundred dollars a day plush, expensive, desperate
Speaker 1: days on the doorstep.
Speaker 2: How much day want? And when tends today?
Speaker 9: A clunk in the attic?
Speaker 11: Okay, you've got a twitch.
Speaker 1: This is your risky visions.
Speaker 7: For it's a long shore wet hot.
Speaker 9: Robert Saki will astound you in the Man with Bogart's face.
Speaker 2: All Right, we're back and we're talking about Casablanca, and yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of other things that we can talk
Speaker 2: about when it comes to this, including I was so
Speaker 2: glad that they had most of, if not the entire
Speaker 2: episode of the fifties version of Casablanca the TV show.
Speaker 2: It was interesting to watch, but it's so weird. The
Speaker 2: thing that really caught me while I was watching that
Speaker 2: was whenever they were on the phone, did you guys
Speaker 2: pick this up? Whenever they were on the phone, whoever
Speaker 2: they were talking to was speaking English, but it was backwards,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, why are you doing that? I guess
Speaker 2: it was to make it sound maybe like a foreign
Speaker 2: language or something, but I was just like, what are
Speaker 2: you doing playing these It was just like on the
Speaker 2: other end of the line, I'm like, what the hell
Speaker 2: call the Red Room? I guess so the little man
Speaker 2: from another place on the other end, I've got good news.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I look, I'm busy for Ari.
Speaker 5: All right, So you got a deal that you can't handle.
Speaker 17: Call me tomorrow.
Speaker 5: I'll fill me in, all right, send him here?
Speaker 7: Never mind? Why just send him here?
Speaker 8: That sounds atrocious. That sounds like the parents in Peanuts.
Speaker 8: W h Yeah, it's hey, it's crazy because that's television.
Speaker 8: And Warners was like right first in the gate we
Speaker 8: can talk about. Oh, Warners is great for being against
Speaker 8: the Nazis first, but they were also the first ones
Speaker 8: to sell all their catalog to television. And that show
Speaker 8: from fifty five is such a ridiculous concept where you
Speaker 8: have like, what was it. It was like three Warner
Speaker 8: properties and they would switch every week.
Speaker 2: I was like the TV wheel. It was like Colombo, Bancheck,
Speaker 2: McMillan and wife McCloud a cloud. Yeah exactly. I was
Speaker 2: gonna say hack Ramsey, but you got me. Every week
Speaker 2: we come to you with a different Warner property. This
Speaker 2: week it's Casa Blanca. All right.
Speaker 7: Great.
Speaker 6: With all of the television versions of this, it just
Speaker 6: tells you how much it's just about the right casting
Speaker 6: and the right atmosphere. And that's so hard to manufacture
Speaker 6: on command, even if you have a game plan from
Speaker 6: how it successfully could work in this film, it just
Speaker 6: seems to be you can have really talented people in
Speaker 6: front of the camera and writing the scripts and try
Speaker 6: to capture that pattern, but it's hard to recapture that
Speaker 6: lightning in a bottle, unfortunately for both shows. And it
Speaker 6: seems like such a natural because it is one location
Speaker 6: full of colorful characters hanging out and getting into intrigue.
Speaker 6: It seems a natural premise for a television show all
Speaker 6: these kind of films, But yeah, it's down at the casting.
Speaker 8: I think I just don't understand why you would pull
Speaker 8: something from forty two. You want to talk about like
Speaker 8: the timeliness of Blanca. It literally opens November twenty six
Speaker 8: Thanksgiving in New York, eighteen days after they land in
Speaker 8: North Africa in Casablanca where it's in the news, and
Speaker 8: then they open wide in the rest of the country
Speaker 8: a couple days after FDR and Churchill are in Casablanca.
Speaker 8: So there's like that tendency on the executives is, look
Speaker 8: in the slush pile, what do we have, what's the
Speaker 8: ip that we can mind more stuff out of? And
Speaker 8: of course after it win's best picture. That's the natural
Speaker 8: predisposition of these just make it again. But it's that
Speaker 8: isolationist tendency in American culture from World War One and
Speaker 8: World War Two, and it's that specific moment, and you're
Speaker 8: going to make it into a weekly television about the
Speaker 8: battle in someone's heart to be a part of the
Speaker 8: world's community, you end up going into banalities.
Speaker 6: It's like a Cold War thing versus the World War
Speaker 6: Two think. So it's a different kind of atmosphere that
Speaker 6: they're trying to tap into and it doesn't fit. But
Speaker 6: that's the thing that struck me with the fifties version especially.
Speaker 6: It's like them trying to deal with the Soviet Union.
Speaker 6: It's the wrong enemy, it's the wrong match of international tension,
Speaker 6: and that location the.
Speaker 2: Eighty three version. There was a video on YouTube that
Speaker 2: was supposed to be just about the eighty three version,
Speaker 2: and I'm not complaining because I thought the video was
Speaker 2: very well done, but the person that put it together
Speaker 2: really gave us more information about things around it than
Speaker 2: the actual show itself. I would love to know how
Speaker 2: that came about, because it feels almost like Raiders of
Speaker 2: the Lost Are was popular, then we start making all
Speaker 2: of these Raiders rip offs, including television's one of my
Speaker 2: shows when I was growing up, when I was ten
Speaker 2: years old watching Tales of the Gold Monkey, and it
Speaker 2: feels almost like this. Casablanca in nineteen eighty three was
Speaker 2: subar Tales of the Gold Monkey because it's David Sell
Speaker 2: as Rick, doctor Alizondo as Louis, and then you've got
Speaker 2: It's so bizarre to see Radiotis show up as Sasha
Speaker 2: and then Arthur Mallet who ralli O. Arthur Mallett, who
Speaker 2: most people will remember is like the old man who
Speaker 2: loses his marbles and hook who also did just a
Speaker 2: ton of great voice work he did I think it
Speaker 2: was mister Mystic and Secret of Nim and then he
Speaker 2: got Scatman Cruthers is sam very thankless role, barely on
Speaker 2: screen a lot of times. And yeah, it was just
Speaker 2: it's five episodes, and from what I saw in this video,
Speaker 2: there was no plan for this to become a regular series.
Speaker 2: It was announced as a limit series, five episodes, no
Speaker 2: real beginning, no real end, and God help me some
Speaker 2: of those boring episodes at first Seed. It was so
Speaker 2: tough to get through this thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, my biggest takeaway watch is you know you're terrible
Speaker 6: when you have Anita Ekberg in the pilot and you
Speaker 6: literally cannot stay awake. But shot on thirty five millimeter
Speaker 6: at least that's what IMDb tells me. But it looks
Speaker 6: like the sixteen millimeter like Fosspender TV productions. As far
Speaker 6: as the look of it, which that was my biggest
Speaker 6: hay with it feels like a European made for television
Speaker 6: movie rather than a TV show. Yeah, esthetically, that was
Speaker 6: the thing I was thinking of, like the World War
Speaker 6: two setting. I was thinking for Hovid and Fosspender as
Speaker 6: I'm watching it, although obviously not as.
Speaker 2: It was rough. I also tried to watch play it
Speaker 2: again Sam for this one, and I turned it off
Speaker 2: after about half an hour because I was just like, Oh,
Speaker 2: this is one of those I can't get laid Woody
Speaker 2: Allen films, and I was like, yeah, I don't really
Speaker 2: need this in my life. I'm sure some people enjoyed it,
Speaker 2: but it was not a highlight for me for Whatdye Allen.
Speaker 6: It was the first time I'd gone back to play
Speaker 6: it against Sam since my early twenties, and so it
Speaker 6: was very odd seeing it again. And I guess it
Speaker 6: plays differently when you're more young and naive about things.
Speaker 6: Looking at it now, I was thinking about, like how
Speaker 6: he does that whole idea of the spectator and the
Speaker 6: film character a relationship better in Purple was of Cairo
Speaker 6: as far as like commenting on that kind of the
Speaker 6: relationship spectators have with film. But I would say that
Speaker 6: the opening where he's just sadly watching the film and
Speaker 6: like that masculine ideal that is so the opposite of
Speaker 6: the neurotic, woody persona. I find that to be not
Speaker 6: funny but the most touching part of the film. And
Speaker 6: then it becomes a broader character than what he'll do,
Speaker 6: and like Annie Hall forward, like it's bringing that character
Speaker 6: down to earth from bananas and take the money and run.
Speaker 6: But it's still a heightened cringe comedy kind of persona,
Speaker 6: Like it doesn't feel as grounded as what he gets
Speaker 6: into a few years later. But it's interesting, like as
Speaker 6: a transition film, but it's a rough watch. I think
Speaker 6: more than that. I remember it being, you know, from
Speaker 6: what I saw it as a kid, but as a
Speaker 6: Bogart thing. It's just interesting how like the idea is
Speaker 6: like that he represents a kind of prefeminist, pre neurosis,
Speaker 6: kind of idea of what men are supposed to be.
Speaker 6: And it's a weird guardian angel figure for the Woody persona.
Speaker 6: It seems totally disconnected from the cinema of Woody Allen
Speaker 6: and the characters he plays, So I don't know, it's
Speaker 6: comparing it to something like The Man with Bogart's Face,
Speaker 6: which I watched for the first time before talking to today.
Speaker 6: It's just odd, like how these are both films that
Speaker 6: are I don't know, the same era, something like The
Speaker 6: Long Goodbye, which is already like taking this whole idea
Speaker 6: of the Bogart Detective and turning it on its ear.
Speaker 6: So to go back to something that is still very
Speaker 6: reverential to that idea is so interesting to me because
Speaker 6: I think about, like the nostalgia for old Hollywood in
Speaker 6: the New Hollywood. I think about films like the Peter
Speaker 6: Bogdanovitch films or The Late Show or things like or
Speaker 6: all those Garbo Speaks kind of movies like like Dave
Speaker 6: the Locusts or all that kind of reference for old
Speaker 6: Hollywood that's starting to emerge in that post Vietnam era.
Speaker 6: And I think about played against Sam sitting within that,
Speaker 6: and just maybe the first film that's trying to speak
Speaker 6: to that Bogart culp in such an eccentric way that
Speaker 6: I I don't know I made it through it today,
Speaker 6: but it was a little bit disappointing after, like, oh,
Speaker 6: I was looking forward to seeing that again. Beyond the
Speaker 6: polarizing nature of Woody ell and in his own life,
Speaker 6: I just think as a film it's probably not one
Speaker 6: that he's even that proud of. I think in retrospect
Speaker 6: it's also weird to see him in San Francisco.
Speaker 8: I was going to bring that up, that he didn't
Speaker 8: direct it and that it was it's actually one of
Speaker 8: the few that's set in San Francisco, and it sarns
Speaker 8: that way. Putting the same spade. The character that he's
Speaker 8: also blending with Rick from Casablanca is more like a
Speaker 8: West Coast thing. It reminded me of and Maltese Falcon
Speaker 8: is set. Where is it actually set in New York too?
Speaker 2: I think it's San Francisco because I think, you know,
Speaker 2: there's the boat that comes in. I think from the Orient,
Speaker 2: but I could be wrong.
Speaker 8: I feel like Maltie, like all that the hord boiled
Speaker 8: stuff that's West Coast and then like East Coast, is
Speaker 8: a kind of different sensibility. But as the youngest person
Speaker 8: here and possibly the most naive person, I actually have
Speaker 8: to say that I really like to play it against
Speaker 8: Sam this time around. I do have to admit that
Speaker 8: I watched it again on VHS not long after watching Casablanca,
Speaker 8: and I was just like taken in by the idea
Speaker 8: of somebody acting against somebody else playing Bogie, like I
Speaker 8: really love the meta textual elements of It's a movie
Speaker 8: about film. And then of course later I watched Purple
Speaker 8: Rose of Cairo, which is a great point. But the
Speaker 8: major factor in that is that that is a woman
Speaker 8: perspective of being serenaded by a man coming off of
Speaker 8: the screen and played against Sam is so wrapped up
Speaker 8: with sexuality of a man, and I enjoyed it for
Speaker 8: what it was of like a nebbish guy versus like
Speaker 8: the image of Bogart and Mike. I thought that you
Speaker 8: would relate to it because like or at least I
Speaker 8: relate to it where it's like making fun of you.
Speaker 8: For anybody who watches way too many movies, we never
Speaker 8: go out anywhere. We never do anything. We just go
Speaker 8: to the movies, and it's like, what do you want
Speaker 8: I write about movies? But I really enjoyed the scene
Speaker 8: of them in the grocery store where his ex wife
Speaker 8: is on one shoulder and the guy that they got
Speaker 8: to play Bogart in played Againsam. I thought was one of,
Speaker 8: if not the best versions of that kind of character.
Speaker 8: And he tells him like, no, don't pick up the
Speaker 8: Jewish votive candles for a holiday, pick up the romantic ones.
Speaker 8: And it's just the ridiculousness of Bogart being like your
Speaker 8: friend in everyday life. I really liked it. And I
Speaker 8: will say, having watched a lot of parodies of the
Speaker 8: ending scene on the tarmac, I will give Alan credit
Speaker 8: that he does not wear the macin the fedora. We
Speaker 8: do have to admit that Casablanca is like one of
Speaker 8: those films that is like famously responsible for a lot
Speaker 8: of men trying to act and dress like Bogart, and
Speaker 8: there are very few people who can pull off the
Speaker 8: macintosh and the fedora and not look goofy. And Alan
Speaker 8: doesn't take it to that point. But that's another thing
Speaker 8: that he didn't direct it too. He just wrote it.
Speaker 8: But it is odd that he started his career putting
Speaker 8: it on stage as the Casablanca Rap Project.
Speaker 6: And Robert Sacchi is that is how you pronounced it.
Speaker 6: The actrom the man with Bogart's face. Boy was Boguard
Speaker 6: in productions that played against Sam Connection and he's an
Speaker 6: actor I know from this Giallo film called The French
Speaker 6: Sex Murders, which you know, it's just like incongruously, like
Speaker 6: that guy looks like Bogart for no reason. But that
Speaker 6: was the interesting ride. I was that the first time
Speaker 6: you had seen this or did you had you seen
Speaker 6: it before?
Speaker 2: That was my first time I thought that there was
Speaker 2: a and I might be inflating things. I thought there
Speaker 2: was an Italian film about a man who looked like
Speaker 2: Humphrey Bogart. But maybe it's the whole that he was
Speaker 2: in the French Sex Murders thing. But yeah, this was
Speaker 2: the first time I saw it, and it really was
Speaker 2: pulling from all of those parody films that were so
Speaker 2: popular at that time, like The Cheap Detective or The
Speaker 2: Blackbird or Murder Can Hurt You or Murdered by Death,
Speaker 2: those types of movies, And yeah, I liked some of
Speaker 2: the things I liked the very beginning with the plastic
Speaker 2: surgery because it reminded me a lot of Dark Passage,
Speaker 2: And I was waiting for the doctor, Philip Baker Hall
Speaker 2: showing up as the doctor. I was waiting for the
Speaker 2: doctor to talk about I could make a man look
Speaker 2: like a booda. You know that line from Dark Passage.
Speaker 17: Ever see any botched plastic job. If a man like
Speaker 17: me didn't like a photo, you could surely fix him
Speaker 17: up for life, make him look like a bulldog or
Speaker 17: a monkey.
Speaker 7: I'll make you look older, but gooder.
Speaker 2: That was so straightened, Like when Mike Mazerski shows up
Speaker 2: and stuff. I'm like, this is really bizarre. But I
Speaker 2: was glad that it owns itself down, as it actually
Speaker 2: gets more into the mystery of the film. But man,
Speaker 2: oh man, where there are some real groaners, especially that
Speaker 2: secretary character. Oh my gosh, hello dudes.
Speaker 5: Oh see, they're in a trillion calls.
Speaker 2: I told her you'd call her back.
Speaker 7: Oh, and an underwear company called.
Speaker 11: They want to know if you'll endorse their staff.
Speaker 7: I don't wear underware.
Speaker 11: I told them there.
Speaker 2: They wanted to know how I knew.
Speaker 7: Would you Shay?
Speaker 2: I can't remember maybe it'll come to you.
Speaker 11: Maybe, but I don't think so, Needa.
Speaker 7: Do I get else? You're on the phone? Who never mind,
Speaker 7: I'll get her.
Speaker 6: Her character reminded me of the Producers, and I was
Speaker 6: thinking about mel Brooks. I was, you know, it feels
Speaker 6: more like a TV movie to me versus like something
Speaker 6: like the Bogdanovitch films from that period. And I guess
Speaker 6: that did a lot of made for television movies, so
Speaker 6: I guess like that aesthetic makes sense. I do have
Speaker 6: to give a shout out to the Great Shark Attack,
Speaker 6: and that was something I did not see coming. But
Speaker 6: there's so much dialogue that's calling attention to how characters
Speaker 6: in advanced echo classic Hollywood movies that it almost has
Speaker 6: like this desperate edge to the film because of just
Speaker 6: it's it's at odds with the nostalgic whimsy of it,
Speaker 6: like just reminding you so much about the references that
Speaker 6: it's making, like by him telling you what they are,
Speaker 6: and it's just like this is a very strange choice
Speaker 6: to do it. It's a very eccentric movie for something
Speaker 6: that's trying to be so lighthearted than whimsical, it feels
Speaker 6: like peculiar in a way that I thought was interesting.
Speaker 2: The whole thing how he's obsessed with the painting of
Speaker 2: Laura and that he thinks that the main character looks
Speaker 2: like Jane Tierney. And I'm like, are you confusing Bulgart
Speaker 2: with Dena andrews uh, because that wasn't the same niyh,
Speaker 2: you know, because there's lots of references to Bargart's stuff
Speaker 2: through here. But then at the same time you're like, whoa, no,
Speaker 2: not not all this, and yeah, just the I assure
Speaker 2: you don't know Gene Tierney. I'm like, Okay, enough with
Speaker 2: the Gene Tyranny thing. Maybe it's somebody who looks like
Speaker 2: another actress, somebody that had been in a Bogart film.
Speaker 2: Try to find a Bacall, try to find a Bergman somebody.
Speaker 2: There were some weird choices in that film, and then
Speaker 2: some of the cameos that they had from like George Raft,
Speaker 2: and I'm just like, I feel so bad for you,
Speaker 2: George Raft, Like, weren't you just in like the Thinks
Speaker 2: ten years prior to this. It's like your whole career
Speaker 2: in the seventies was like doing weird cameos and things.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you were in I'm sure he was in
Speaker 2: Sextead as well.
Speaker 6: It felt also like oddly European because of Franco Niro
Speaker 6: and simple Danning I and I only have this association
Speaker 6: with a Yallow film for Robert Sacci, so it feels like,
Speaker 6: even though it feels like a very Hollywood American film,
Speaker 6: it's like all this weird European film kind of energy
Speaker 6: flowing throughout it, which I thought was another odd thing
Speaker 6: to note with it. Yeah, I was glad to finally
Speaker 6: have seen it. It's bizarre movies, It's very bizarre. And
Speaker 6: I thought that Victor Bono did a fantastic Sydney Green
Speaker 6: Street impersonation. I thought that was very smart. And I
Speaker 6: don't even remember seeing some of the people that they
Speaker 6: called out in the beginning to be like and cameos
Speaker 6: from Yvon de Carlo and I'm like, yeah, I don't
Speaker 6: really even remember her being in the movie, but I
Speaker 6: definitely remember Olivia Hussey, who I thought named Elsa in here.
Speaker 6: Who And I was just like, Okay, she's going to
Speaker 6: be the main love interest. No, no, it's actually I
Speaker 6: guess it was Michelle Phillips.
Speaker 2: Who's the main love interest. I'm just like Okay, just
Speaker 2: pick one. Would you like have somebody torn between two loves?
Speaker 2: But it was a weird, weird movie.
Speaker 8: Sounds like a classic European production that just falls apart.
Speaker 8: The script is not there, which is funny considering Casablanca itself.
Speaker 8: Like the script was not there, but the sensibilities are
Speaker 8: just totally different.
Speaker 2: Well, the guy who wrote it, it was based on
Speaker 2: his book, Andrew J. Fenneddy. He had written some really
Speaker 2: good things, like a lot of people swear by Black Noon,
Speaker 2: the TV movie that's kind of a horror TV film.
Speaker 2: Actually he wrote the movie that I just did a
Speaker 2: commentary for a few months ago, Arnold, which was really bad.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I guess he's kind of all over the
Speaker 2: At least he's consistent. Yeah, And I know that there
Speaker 2: were like book sequels that were proposed for I don't
Speaker 2: remember the name of the book that came out. Actually,
Speaker 2: there have been a couple books, right, There was an
Speaker 2: official Warner Brothers book that was both a prequel and
Speaker 2: a sequel, and then there were at David Thompson book
Speaker 2: that was kind of like short stories about what happened
Speaker 2: to these characters. And I love that he really plays
Speaker 2: up the whole Captain Renault was gay thing, and that
Speaker 2: like he and Rick end up living together and movie
Speaker 2: any kind of thing. I was just like, Oh, that's nice.
Speaker 2: I love that whole thing, Like, well, if I were
Speaker 2: a woman, I should be in love with Rick.
Speaker 8: You want to talk about skirting the production code line like, oh, man,
Speaker 8: that Renault is characterized in the film gets really close
Speaker 8: to the edge in many ways, it's becoming.
Speaker 6: More open minded that line of that day. Oh yes,
Speaker 6: that's taking both the book wife and husband with them.
Speaker 2: When I watched for this was across the Pacific, which
Speaker 2: I hadn't seen before, was it?
Speaker 7: Is it?
Speaker 2: Journey to Jeremy to Marse is the one that's a
Speaker 2: flashback within a flashback, and then there's another flashback within it,
Speaker 2: which is just amazing, like a series of flashbacks and
Speaker 2: flashbacks that characters who are telling the story should have
Speaker 2: no business knowing. I love that that it is so
Speaker 2: bizarrely structured, And what a fucking ending of that movie.
Speaker 8: Holy shit, it's incredible, like the nesting doll structure of it.
Speaker 8: And I read a lot of people like criticizing it,
Speaker 8: and I have problems with it too, because it's incredible
Speaker 8: to me because I actually loathe frame stories. I despise
Speaker 8: them to it. But I watched that movie and I
Speaker 8: had a great time. Even though it's like three stories
Speaker 8: all segmented into each other. I really really enjoyed Passes
Speaker 8: to Marseille. I just have to say that, like that
Speaker 8: was probably like the biggest standout in terms of like
Speaker 8: preparing for this episode was just going back to another
Speaker 8: Curtiz film. They have Steiner back. They even have Don Siegel,
Speaker 8: who I don't think we talked about, the director of
Speaker 8: the Lineup and Dirty Harry. He was the montage director
Speaker 8: at Warner Brothers at the time, so he worked on
Speaker 8: Passages to Marseille too. The ending is really the kicker
Speaker 8: of it because at the end spoilers they Warner Brothers
Speaker 8: decides to go one further and they have Humphrey Bogart,
Speaker 8: their leading man, commit a war crime by shooting unarmed
Speaker 8: Nazi pilots on the wing of a reconnaissance aircraft in
Speaker 8: what is it like the South Atlantic? I got the
Speaker 8: coast of Portugal and Coole movie is like structured incredibly
Speaker 8: like propaganda. But that moment I was cheering and yelling
Speaker 8: and screaming, I was just like you have the guts
Speaker 8: to finally say no, this is actually total war. And
Speaker 8: so much of American media during like during the war
Speaker 8: and afterwards was kind of milk toast about that. They
Speaker 8: don't really want to say, like, oh, no, this is
Speaker 8: a battle to the death. But having Humphrey Bogart gun
Speaker 8: down unarmed men, oh what a film? What a film?
Speaker 8: And Claude Rains, Oh my goodness. Like the most amazing
Speaker 8: thing I learned afterwards was Claude Rain was in a
Speaker 8: gas attack. He was injured in World War One and
Speaker 8: he was like ninety percent blind in his like right eye.
Speaker 8: So in Passage to Marseilles, in Passage to Marseille, they
Speaker 8: just have this like eye patch over him. So he's
Speaker 8: like this monocular like French like air wing captain. And
Speaker 8: he's fantastic in that film. I mean, he's always fantastic,
Speaker 8: but it it moves, and Peter Laurie is incredible in it.
Speaker 8: Everything about it is just glorious. Yeah, it's like.
Speaker 6: A Saragosa manuscript kind of nesting dulls. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 6: that that whole act sequence that he is kind of
Speaker 6: a knockout. But again, it's like taking the hard world
Speaker 6: Warner Brothers x Khan kind of thing and putting them
Speaker 6: against the Nazis. They're the least French soldiers I think
Speaker 6: I can think of in a movie. But I thought
Speaker 6: of another one I watched for this was All Through
Speaker 6: the Night, the Vincent Sherman movie, with which is like
Speaker 6: I say, like Casa Blanca in New York. As far
Speaker 6: as Bogart, it's got Conrad Weid Is the Nazi, it's
Speaker 6: got Peter Lourie. But it's also they're not quite gangsters.
Speaker 6: They're like, you know, involved in you know, gambling in
Speaker 6: such in that. But they uncovered this Nazi conspiracy in
Speaker 6: New York and it's a great kind of just I'd
Speaker 6: never heard one. I mean, also, you know it's maybe
Speaker 6: be tier Bogart, but I thought that was a lot
Speaker 6: of fun as far as like films trying to cash
Speaker 6: in on that Casablanca energy, because it doesn't feel like
Speaker 6: it's trying to be anything grand, Like it's just a
Speaker 6: solid little crime film that just happens to be tapping
Speaker 6: into that anti Nazi sentiment that Casa Blanca does, and
Speaker 6: just like character that is maybe out for himself becoming
Speaker 6: you know, motivated to stick up for America in this
Speaker 6: kind of circumstance. But yeah, I thought that was a great.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think I watched like five or six things for this.
Speaker 6: This fart was like Man from Cairo and sing a
Speaker 6: wild ride, getting to all the way down to the
Speaker 6: man with Bogart's face.
Speaker 2: I'll do you one better. I rewatched barb Weier for
Speaker 2: this one as well, which is as I mentioned that
Speaker 2: to my wife, She's like, why are you watching barb
Speaker 2: Weier for your Casablanca show? I'm like, don't you remember Hunt?
Speaker 2: It's basically a remake of Casa Clanka. And as we're
Speaker 2: watching it, I'm just like, see there's Captain Renault, Xander Berklaye,
Speaker 2: See there's Major Strass or Steve Rail's back, you know,
Speaker 2: like as they're doing this and like, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 2: need these contacts or whatever to make us not be
Speaker 2: retinal scanned, it was just like, those are the letters
Speaker 2: of transit. So that was fantastic being able to see
Speaker 2: that movie again. I've fucking loved that film. It's so
Speaker 2: stupid and so great all of the same time. Man,
Speaker 2: Oh and I'm there and I'm just quoting lines and
Speaker 2: I hadn't seen it since when did that come out?
Speaker 2: Like ninety six eighty seven, probably from the trailer, but
Speaker 2: especially the guy that played a little Bruno and swamp things.
Speaker 2: How he's like her BDSM customer.
Speaker 1: Did you wash your hands?
Speaker 7: No? I was bad.
Speaker 8: I'm so glad to hear that. How about Udo Kir.
Speaker 8: I had no idea about barb Weier before this, Like,
Speaker 8: you put this on the viewing notes and I was
Speaker 8: basically your wife. I was just like, what are you
Speaker 8: talking about? This is like, like, this is crazy. You're
Speaker 8: gonna make me watch a movie with the what's the
Speaker 8: name of the main actress, Pamela Anderson?
Speaker 2: She was sorry, Pamela, Yes.
Speaker 8: Yeah, because she was married And and I watched it
Speaker 8: and I was like, oh my god. Udo Kir is
Speaker 8: Peter Lori. He's just like reincarnated, like he's he's German,
Speaker 8: he's weird. Wow, he's you know, bald, all that kind
Speaker 8: of stuff. But the sad part is he plays Sam
Speaker 8: and barbed wire. He doesn't have any musical like I
Speaker 8: would love to watch Udo Kir Singh. I mean, just
Speaker 8: imagine the novelty. I mean, I'm sure it's terrible, but
Speaker 8: it would be amazing. And and he doesn't have like
Speaker 8: a meteor role. I really like Steve Railsback, though he
Speaker 8: was likebsolutely chewing the scenery and making the US government
Speaker 8: a bunch of Nazis that literally live in the decayed
Speaker 8: Capitol building. Is like, doesn't seem so far mentioned any
Speaker 8: far from nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 2: Sat in the distant year of twenty seventeen, I think
Speaker 2: it was, And she says something like, twenty seventeen was
Speaker 2: the worst year of my life. I was like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I hear you. You could seem to remember who came
Speaker 2: to power that year. Yeah, yeah, I would say that
Speaker 2: the Peter Lorie diuties that was actually split between Udo
Speaker 2: Kir and Clint Howard, because I think he's the one
Speaker 2: that ends up selling her the stuff or has you know,
Speaker 2: taken those contacts or whatever. But I was getting a
Speaker 2: little bit more horror from Udo Kir, And yeah, he's fantastic.
Speaker 2: He could. I mean, his voice is so similar to
Speaker 2: Peter Lourie's a lot of times, and I think if
Speaker 2: he just turned it just a little bit, he would
Speaker 2: be exactly Peter Lourie. You test me, don't you, Barb.
Speaker 6: I had never seen this one before either. I remember
Speaker 6: when when I was in Ithaca, like the film teacher
Speaker 6: that was showing it to students, even back in like
Speaker 6: the I guess in the when it was a new
Speaker 6: film because it was a Casablanca riff. But watching The Guy,
Speaker 6: I was reminded also of Barbarella. For some reason, it
Speaker 6: felt like John It felt like John Wu's Barberrella is
Speaker 6: what they were trying to go for. But that director
Speaker 6: is primarily a music video director, and it has that
Speaker 6: aesthetic of like a heavy metal video get merged with
Speaker 6: Casablanca's political themes, and but also an approach to action
Speaker 6: that feel like kind of campy but trying to be cool.
Speaker 6: It kind of it felt like the amount of slow
Speaker 6: motion in that movie is just like I was thinking,
Speaker 6: because Pamela Anderson has had this kind of resurgence in
Speaker 6: the last year with the Last show Girl, and I
Speaker 6: wonder if this is going to be reassessed, you know,
Speaker 6: as a forward as an ahead of its time kind
Speaker 6: of cult film. It's very over the top, so it's
Speaker 6: a different kind of It's not gonna be a Golden
Speaker 6: Globe nominee kind of movie for her, but yeah, it's interesting,
Speaker 6: and yeah, I would have never thought of this for
Speaker 6: Casablanca episode until you put it on the list.
Speaker 8: It's nicely lit in photographed too. Like going back to it,
Speaker 8: it felt like so nostout because this is not like
Speaker 8: the greatest script. It's not the greatest locale all this
Speaker 8: kind of stuff, but it's like shot on film. It
Speaker 8: shot at the docks, and they have like real fights,
Speaker 8: like they were up on a giant crane and you
Speaker 8: could tell that there was stuntmen actually up in the air.
Speaker 8: I mean they probably had pads and all that kind
Speaker 8: of stuff, but it felt tactile. They have a few
Speaker 8: digital effects in it, and like Matt paintings and stuff
Speaker 8: like that. I think the pivy remark that I had
Speaker 8: when I realized what I was watching was like giving
Speaker 8: the Humphrey Bogart character from Casablanca giant implants is quite
Speaker 8: the choice.
Speaker 2: Just ridiculous we're talking about like, oh, yeah, Cassive Blanc
Speaker 2: was just another production. You know, it was just lightning
Speaker 2: in a bottle, And then you see what the film
Speaker 2: could have been if it was remade in just a
Speaker 2: little bit of a different way. Yes, to see how
Speaker 2: it turns out, And yeah, it's so reminded me of
Speaker 2: those mid nineties sci fi films. I was picking up
Speaker 2: a little Johnny mammonic in this one as well. You
Speaker 2: know you mentioned Barbarrella. I can totally see that and
Speaker 2: just yeah, those ridiculous opening credits where it's just all
Speaker 2: guys hosing her down while music's just pumping and she's
Speaker 2: not really stripping. She's one of those strippers who doesn't strip,
Speaker 2: kind of things like Strip Teas and a few other
Speaker 2: movies from the time. It's like, okay, yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: know what her she is the entertainment as well as
Speaker 2: the person that owns the bar. I guess they just
Speaker 2: saved a little bit of money. There was no piano
Speaker 2: player that they necessarily needed. They just could throw barb
Speaker 2: up on stage.
Speaker 6: I bought the Arrow edition of Demolition Men, but I
Speaker 6: haven't watched it with your commentary yet, But I was
Speaker 6: thinking as I was watching it, like, is this something
Speaker 6: that you revisited for research, like getting in touch with
Speaker 6: like that nineties sci fi action slightly camp well not
Speaker 6: even slightly, but like that kind of like that kind
Speaker 6: of like Joel Schumacher or a crazy spectacle kind of
Speaker 6: action of the nineties, Like was this something that you
Speaker 6: saw like within that tradition.
Speaker 2: Oh, I would definitely say so. And I didn't have
Speaker 2: to revisit it for that commentary because barb Weare lives
Speaker 2: in my heart with me every day.
Speaker 8: You pray at the altar of Barbed Wire.
Speaker 2: Any movie that has timu Lister, Timil Morris and Jack
Speaker 2: Knows were they, Steve rails Back, Udo kir I mean,
Speaker 2: Clinton Howard, just so many amazing people in this film.
Speaker 2: You can't go wrong with these character actors, this ninety
Speaker 2: set of character actors. And the only thing that I
Speaker 2: really disliked was just how small verl Timeylister had because
Speaker 2: I was pounting on him to really show us his
Speaker 2: stuff in this.
Speaker 6: We need to get you a theater like the Brattle,
Speaker 6: and we need to get barb Weier week. You know
Speaker 6: you programming that you can start the cult in Detroit.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 2: And by the way, the actor whose name I couldn't
Speaker 2: remember was Nicholas Worth also not just little Bruno but
Speaker 2: also fantastic in Dark Man as well.
Speaker 6: He's the killer from Don't Answer the Phone.
Speaker 8: I don't want to like do like a total downer
Speaker 8: because barb Weire is like so much fun. But Mike,
Speaker 8: I think you and I watched the same movie in
Speaker 8: Prepper for this, which was a night in Castle Blank
Speaker 8: of the Marx Brothers movie from forty six.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, and I forgot that and maybe I
Speaker 2: meant to forget it, but I couldn't make my way
Speaker 2: through that one either. Holy oh oh.
Speaker 11: Yeah, okay, I it's just I uh.
Speaker 2: Philly Marx Brothers movies, you know, like the guy that
Speaker 2: plays Sasha was and Duck Soup one of my favorites.
Speaker 2: You know he's in there.
Speaker 1: He's like, I have failed investadors. I know it, I
Speaker 1: know it, you idiot. I'm sorry, you have muddled everything.
Speaker 1: If you started the revolution as I planned during the turmoil,
Speaker 1: I could have stepped in and placed Fredonia under the
Speaker 1: Sylvanian flag.
Speaker 7: Our flag?
Speaker 1: What's five flag? Bla, your excellency, you have no idea?
Speaker 7: How fuck look he's in Fredonia.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, I've known of that too. That's why I
Speaker 1: have two spies shadowing him.
Speaker 2: Duck Soup feels like, oh, we performed this in front
Speaker 2: of audiences. We really owned these bits. We had all
Speaker 2: this stuff going, and then he come to a movie
Speaker 2: that's so much later, like Night in Casablanca, and you're
Speaker 2: like and these jokes just kind of I don't ring
Speaker 2: like they ran them in front of anybody before. What
Speaker 2: were your impressions on Night in Casablanca.
Speaker 8: I can say that I watched it, but I like
Speaker 8: sort of half watched it. I was like peeling orangese
Speaker 8: to make ors just and I was like watching it
Speaker 8: at the same time. It's insane to me because I'm
Speaker 8: with you, like cig Rumin is good in it. He
Speaker 8: just all he says is fine, over and over and
Speaker 8: over again. He is basically like a one note character,
Speaker 8: but he's still good because you know, he's that classic,
Speaker 8: you know, Vaudeville. I'm here to set up the jokes,
Speaker 8: all that kind of stuff. You know, people complain about
Speaker 8: Zeppo in the March Brothers movies, and they just replace
Speaker 8: them with the most whitebread couple in the world. I
Speaker 8: just wanted to die every time they were on screen.
Speaker 8: And I feel sorry for bringing it up now because
Speaker 8: I bring up the memory and now we're going to
Speaker 8: talk about it. But I did want to bring up
Speaker 8: the one interesting thing about Night in Casablanca in relation
Speaker 8: to the original, because it's not really a parody, you know,
Speaker 8: it's just set at Casablanca, doesn't really have the same
Speaker 8: thing is that there are people in brown face in
Speaker 8: A Night in Casablanca and like from forty two to
Speaker 8: forty six already, like they've just decided, oh no, we're
Speaker 8: not casting base on nationality and having people speak in
Speaker 8: the original language. And I actually looked up most of
Speaker 8: the cast for A Night in Casablanca. Eighty percent of
Speaker 8: them are from the Midwest, and they're putting on these
Speaker 8: ridiculous accents. Harpo, Groucho, Chico, they have their scene, especially
Speaker 8: the musical sequences. I love you know, they're just simple,
Speaker 8: but yes, I'm right there with you where you can
Speaker 8: tell that they did not hammer this out. And it's
Speaker 8: a real shame because Groucho is still fast with the
Speaker 8: jokes and there are great sequences in it, but you
Speaker 8: just have to have the structure to hang those jokes on,
Speaker 8: and it just absolutely completely falls apart.
Speaker 2: I just feels bad because the Marx brothers themselves just
Speaker 2: look very old. Especially Harpo just looks like he's really
Speaker 2: gone round the ben in this one. My favorite parts
Speaker 2: of this movie were the music sequences. I love watching
Speaker 2: Chico play piano and how he was able to go
Speaker 2: from what was it Hungarian Rhapsody Number two to the
Speaker 2: beer Barrel Polka and the orchestra like doing that whole
Speaker 2: hopping thing that they're doing as he's like coming down
Speaker 2: hard on the piano, and I love the way that
Speaker 2: he plays the piano where he's using finger guns to
Speaker 2: hit the keys. He's just amazing and I could just
Speaker 2: watch that for an hour and a half. But then they,
Speaker 2: you know, all these other things, and I'm like, Okay.
Speaker 2: I also like the part with the German and how
Speaker 2: he's hiding out and that he can't leave his room
Speaker 2: because Harpo has sucked his two pey into a vacuum.
Speaker 2: I thought that whole thing where he's really fucking with
Speaker 2: that guy, I thought that was great. I love what
Speaker 2: a force of anarchy Harpo is. But yeah, it just
Speaker 2: wasn't seeing. It just took it a long time before
Speaker 2: we got Groucho, and then a lot of times in
Speaker 2: these movies, it takes a long time before Groucho and
Speaker 2: Chico have a scene together. And just the way that
Speaker 2: Groucho is com constantly putting down cheeks go some of
Speaker 2: the best insults of all times where they just rang hollow.
Speaker 8: In this one, absolutely. I will say for the last
Speaker 8: thing is at the ending they have a DC three
Speaker 8: They have stunned men on an actual runway with the
Speaker 8: engines running and this going down the tarmac, and is
Speaker 8: incredible to see it because you can tell that it's
Speaker 8: actually really done and it's like forty six so they
Speaker 8: have all of the surplus war material, so they're basically
Speaker 8: just destroying whatever they can get. That ending was was
Speaker 8: mildly and from the perspective of watching of watching those people,
Speaker 8: but yeah, no. The thing about the March Brothers that
Speaker 8: I always go back to and I can always always
Speaker 8: talk about is that there's a moment each and every
Speaker 8: single March Brothers movies where Chico and Harpo they start
Speaker 8: playing their instruments and the mask basically falls from their
Speaker 8: face like they're no longer the character that they play
Speaker 8: every other time because they have to focus and you
Speaker 8: can tell that they've been drilled from childhood playing on
Speaker 8: stage endlessly and they are laser focused, and you know,
Speaker 8: he doesn't smile, he doesn't like do goofy faces, and
Speaker 8: Harpo either, and I just love that dropping of the
Speaker 8: mask where you can tell, oh, no, these people are
Speaker 8: consummate professionals.
Speaker 2: All right, we're going to take another break and play
Speaker 2: a preview for next week's show right after these brief messages.
Speaker 3: Dumb a person lacking mental.
Speaker 7: Power when you're the most annoying down in the world.
Speaker 3: Stupid a person below normal intelligence. Jim Carrey, Jeff Daniels,
Speaker 3: Dumb and Dumber Luck.
Speaker 7: Yes, from Uline Home Video.
Speaker 4: It's the smash it that's redefining comedy and has critics
Speaker 4: and audiences across the country. Ratings Yeah, obnoxiously triumph. Dumb
Speaker 4: and Dumber makes you laugh out loud for almost its
Speaker 4: entire running time. Spectacularly dumb. Jim Carrey gives his funniest
Speaker 4: performance by far, the hippiest and most hilarious of Jim
Speaker 4: Carrey's films, Dumb and Dumber from You Line Home Video.
Speaker 7: That's right.
Speaker 2: We'll be back next week with another cinematic classic, The
Speaker 2: Fairly Brothers Dumb and Dummer. Until then, I want to
Speaker 2: thank my co host Bill and Federico. So, Bill, what
Speaker 2: is keeping you busy lately?
Speaker 6: Doing a bunch of commentaries for Blu Ray. I think
Speaker 6: the ones I can talk about Baby It's You is
Speaker 6: coming out soon. The John Sales movie. I did a
Speaker 6: solo commentary profunciate editions, and also did one for Racing
Speaker 6: with the Moon, speaking of nineteen forty two and World
Speaker 6: War two era, the Richard Benjamin film that Maria Gates
Speaker 6: and I did a commentary for that film, and I
Speaker 6: also did one for four forty four Last Down Earth,
Speaker 6: the able for our movie with Chris O'Neill. So these
Speaker 6: are all things I've just come out in the last
Speaker 6: few weeks. So that's some of the stuff that I've
Speaker 6: been working out is keeping me busy.
Speaker 2: And Frederica, what's new in your world?
Speaker 8: Sir? Can I just say I love how next week
Speaker 8: you're going to Dumb and Dumber and they're like, it's
Speaker 8: like high art low art, but they're both masterpieces in
Speaker 8: their own domain. It's like it's a perfect distillation of
Speaker 8: what I love about this show. I was just gonna say,
Speaker 8: I do film editing, and when I can, I do
Speaker 8: a little bit of programming along with watching far too
Speaker 8: many films. I'm always looking forward to Nitrate, as you
Speaker 8: neatly mentioned during the recording. But I do write for
Speaker 8: a substack called Air the Sunrises, and you can find
Speaker 8: it at e TSR. Dot substack dot com. That's Echo
Speaker 8: Tango Sierra Romeo dot substack dot com. On there, you
Speaker 8: can also find a little article about how much the
Speaker 8: Projection Booth has meant to me and why this was
Speaker 8: such an honor. So Lastly, if you'd like to get
Speaker 8: in contact for any reason, even if it's to tell
Speaker 8: me what you thought of my comments on this show,
Speaker 8: you can reach me at four through four nine six
Speaker 8: four eight four one seven. I want to thank you
Speaker 8: again Mike Bill, and I look forward to speaking to
Speaker 8: you again.
Speaker 2: Thank you again guys for being out of the show,
Speaker 2: and thanks everybody for listening. If you want to hear
Speaker 2: more of me shooting off my mouth, check out some
Speaker 2: of the other shows that I work on. They are
Speaker 2: all available at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our
Speaker 2: Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit
Speaker 2: patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. Every donation we get
Speaker 2: helps the Projection Booth take over the world.
Speaker 7: You must remember this.
Speaker 12: A kiss is just a keys aside, just a side.
Speaker 12: The fundamental things.
Speaker 18: Applat as time goes by, and when two lovers woo,
Speaker 18: they still say I love you.
Speaker 12: All that you can rely, no matter of the future,
Speaker 12: praise as.
Speaker 14: Time goes by, moonlight and all songs never out of day.
Speaker 2: Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hey.
Speaker 19: Woman needs man, and man must have his maid that
Speaker 19: no one can den.
Speaker 18: It's still the same old story. A fight for love
Speaker 18: and glory, a case of do a die. The world
Speaker 18: will always well olcome love us as time goes to ball.
Speaker 12: Light and love songs never out.
Speaker 19: Of day, arts full of passion, jealousy and hate. Woman
Speaker 19: needs man, and man must have his maid that.
Speaker 7: No one can dinner.
Speaker 18: It's still the same old story, a fight for love
Speaker 18: and glory, a case.
Speaker 8: Of do a die.
Speaker 12: The world will always welcome Love us as time goods
Speaker 12: and ball