Getting back to the OP, my (now ex-) girlfriend is 38. She refuses to watch anything in B&W. It’s one of the reasons she’s a ex 
… and lighting.
Interesting point about Gone With the Wind. I picked it up on VHS from the library a few weeks ago, thinking I really should watch it sometime, even though I’ve long suspected it’s not my sort of movie. When I sat down to watch it that opening on-screen narrative brought it home to me that I wasn’t in a mood to watch it, and I’ve never felt remotely nostalgic for life in the Deep South before the Civil War.
I’ve also got to quote one of my favorite series of lines from Casablanca, if only because I’ve been tempted to use the last one more than once:
Sacha (the bartender): Yvonne, I love you!
Yvonne: Give me another drink!
Rick:Cut her off!
Sacha: Yvonne, I love you!
Yvonne: Give me another drink!
Rick:Cut her off!
Yvonne: Give me another drink!
Sacha: Yvonne, I love you. But, he pays me!
One of the basic rules of surviving in cynical times: no matter how much you love someone, never forget who pays your bills. 
CJ
OK, so I can’t quote movies to save my life. The second time around, Rick’s line should have been “I said, ‘Cut her off!’” :smack:
It’s still a movie I thoroughly enjoy.
CJ
Reverse, just curious, but what black and white films have you seen? Have you seen any of the movies mentioned by name in this thread?
[nitpick]… the angel’s name is Clarence. [/nitpick]
As for Reverse, have you seen The Man Who Wasn’t There? (2001, btw), Schindler’s List? Pi? How about ANYTHING by Hitchcock, especially Sabotage and Strangers on a Train? Or Sunset Boulevard? Double Indemnity? Are recent movies okay, because Pi most definitely does not have any your mentioned flaws.
You’re equating a film stock with a stereotype of characters and plot.
Reminds me of the lady who saw Hamlet and said, “Why, that play was nothing but a lot of quotations!”
I just checked my DVD library, and there’s a lamentable dearth of Bogart. I need to get Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen. Good stuff. I just wish Bogart could have played Sam Spade in some more movies.
Read Paul Brickhill’s book The Great Escape —which is a true story, and much better than any of the movies based on it. At one point, two of the POWs who escaped from Stalag Luft Drei were placed – temporarily – in a concentration camp. They were able to escape. In fact, escape was much easier than from the Luftwaffe prison, apparently because conditions were worse, and they weren’t expecting as much effort from dispirited citizens. They admitted that their crude unnel wouldn’t have lasted a week at the Stalag, but at thi camp they were able to run it shallow and unbraced.
I’m sure it wasn’t the only case.
The Big Sleep is my favourite movie.
I own hundreds of black and white films. But I have also seem a great many really bad “four star” black and white films rated as classics by the geeks at TV Guide.
Baldwin: Don’t forget To Have and Have Not. My second-favourite Bogart film.
My FIRST fav Bogie film! As much as I love Casablanca, I just have to go with Bacall over Bergman.
Anyway, the two movies are practically joined at the hip, as far as cast and war-time intrigue go.
I really lucked out with my first viewings of both of them. In the late Seventies, our local art-house, the Ridge, showed a lot of wonderful old films. I saw them as well as The African Queen, Citizen Kane, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and a triple feature of Metropolis, Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Great stuff! At the time I was in my late teens. From the age of about sixteen until well into my twenties I read everything I could get my hands on about the film industry pre 1950. I’m still very interested in the subject. (Hi Eve!)
My teenagers will watch an old movie if it’s on, but I don’t think they’d go out of their way like I did at their age. I even sat through the whole of Birth of a Nation on the Knowledge Network with one hand on the TV airiel so I could get a clear enough picture!
My stepson, who is 16, is taking a drama course in high school. Last fall they didn’t do an actual play, but instead decided to do a series of un-related scenes from their favorite movies. Someone had the good sense to pick “Casablanca,” which is a wonderful movie and one of my favories (my favorite being “The Maltese Falcon,” but I digress). Unfortunately, the kids (God bless them) have, well, I’ll be blunt, no talent and the results were bad. I mean REALLY bad - Leonard Pinth Garnell “Really Bad Playhouse” bad.
So the kids are doing the a scene from Casablanca and the boy playing Rick says, “Hey, I’m looking at you, kid.” WTF? “Here’s looking at you, kid.” 5 words. Easy. One of the most often repeated bits of movie dialoge ever.
I walked out, it was just too painful.
To prove how right you are pkbites I’ll tell you a true story.
I was mainly brought up in Canberra but after school moved to Sydney. In the 1970s it probably took 4 hours to drive from Canberra to Sydney. One day I was rung by a friend in Canberra who noticed that Casablanca was on late night Sydney TV. Could he and his wife come and watch it? Sure, mate why not? I had a VCR at this time but I don’t think I knew another person who owned one.
Jan and his wife drove 4 hours to Sydney, watched Casablanca, accepted my videotape (luckily I’d gone VHS not Beta, so they still have it), jumped in their car and drove home for work the next day.
Who would do that for Dude Where’s My Car or Zoolander or Welcome To The Jungle?
I love this movie. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen a few years back. A packed cinema all laughing with and enjoying a 50+ year old movie. What a great movie even if the plot is somewhat confusing 
"Have you met my daughter?
- Yes, she tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up"
and as for the Boggy / Bacall scene about racing WOW.
We watched Casablanca a few months ago with our daughters, 8 and 10, who loved it. The younger one was spouting lines at us for the next few weeks–pretty funny. What I really appreciated this time around was how the comedic asides are layered over the darker story. My kids were laughing at the one-liners, and then drawn right back into the plot. I watched the kids watch the movie, and saw the movie in a whole new way myself. Nice.
It’s not my favorite movie of all time, but I like it a lot. My one quibble is that the subtext of Jews trying to escape the Final Solution is so lightly hinted at–in the first scene at Rick’s I believe–that it’s nearly non-existent; I wish it had been spelled out a bit more clearly.
Finally, somebody early in this thread made mention of an alternate ending. Is this on a new, re-re-re-release DVD or something? We watched it on a DVD from the library, but I didn’t see anything about alternate endings. What was the alternate ending?
The film was released in 1942. No one (certainly not movie screen writers) had a clear idea about what was going on in Germany.
But you’re, like, um, it should be one of your favorite, I mean, does it just bring up bad memories or something? And why did you drop the Laszlo?
That’s the party line, but in reality, EVERYBODY knew what the Nazis had been doing to the Jews in Germany for the previous decade. It didn’t take much of a leap to figure out what was going on now that war was being waged. The intelligentsia in America, which includes Hollywood screenwriters in those days, had a very good idea of what was going on. That’s why there is the veiled reference to Jews being desperate to get out of the Nazi clutches in the opening scene of the film. That’s also why Rick gives exit visas to the woman [vaguely Jewish in a Hollywoodish way] and her new husband early in the film. Rick knows, as do the filmmakers, that for some people it really is a matter of life or death to get hold of papers like this. Casablanca is a film about escaping the Holocaust. The characters know the situation, and the screenwriters knew too.
From that website you linked:
The movie Casablanca was in production 25 May 1942 — 3 August 1942, and released in November 1942.
I was playing Ghost Recon just after having watched the film, and I named my mission “Ilsa_Lund,” cause I had an image of Ingrid Bergman gunning down commandos with an M-16 screaming “Die you MOTHERFUCKERS!” The next day, after having lurked for several months, I needed to search for something and had to register. “Ilsa_Lund” was the first thing that sprang to mind. 
:eek: 
;j