[QUOTE=Siege]
91 posts and no one’s mentioned one of my favourite and most useful bits of dialogue from the movie. It’s a tiny little scene, but a good one. Yvonne, a French expatriot who’s had one too many is trying to get the bartender to serve her. Please bear with me if I botch the lines a little.
Bartender: Yvonne, I love you.
Yvonne: Give me a drink!
Rick: Cut her off!
Bartender: Yvonne, I love you.
Yvonne: Give me a drink!
Rick: I said, “Cut her off!”
Bartender: Yvonne, I love you, but he pays me.
[/QUOTE]
Rick: So Yvonne’s gone over to the enemy.
Renault: Who knows? In her own way, she may constitute an entire second front.
I was fortunate enough to see it before I knew all the quotes. Renault calling from the airport phone to say “Major Strasser has been shot … Round up the usual suspects” was one of the great, glorious moments of relief and exultation in movie history. Just behind that is “Welcome back to the fight, Rick.”
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
And I disagree that Bogart was just being Bogart. First of all, if you watch enough of his films, you will see that he didn’t really HAVE a particular persona he played in film; his characters are as different as Queeg and Allnut. Further, even if we focus on the typical Bogart-as-private-eye character, this isn’t how he behaves during the flashback scenes to Paris before the arrival of the Germans, when he has first met Ilsa and is in love. Just MHO.
[/QUOTE]
And look at his stuff in the 1930s. He often did not play “cool.” In The Roaring Twenties, he’s even a bully and simpering coward. Wasn’t it Casablanca that finally gave him his reputation for cool?
100 posts, and I’m the only one who prefers To Have and Have Not, mainly becasue I think Bogart and Bacall had better chemistry than Bogart & Bergman?
Oh well, as you were.
[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
100 posts, and I’m the only one who prefers To Have and Have Not, mainly becasue I think Bogart and Bacall had better chemistry than Bogart & Bergman?
Oh well, as you were.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
… I especially like the survivng brother telling how they came up with the ending. They knew the girl was going to fly away and Bogie get left behind to kill the Nazi, but they could not figure out how to work it that he gets away with it. He said they were driving down the street one day, when suddenly he just brakes to a stop, looks at his brother, and they both say at the same time, “Round up the usual suspects!”
[/QUOTE]
And the best part of this story is that they later got a call from the director, saying that the final scene wasn’t working out that well. Claude was on the phone reporting that Strasser has been shot, and he was reading it all in one breath:
"Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects. "
And they had to tell him, “No, no! ‘Major Strasser has been shot.’ then a big pause while he looks at Bogie, THEN ‘Round up the usual suspects.’”
[QUOTE=carnivorousplant]
Or legality. For example, the Bismarck could not stay safely in a neutral port, but had to put to sea again with the waiting British ships.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t remember the Bismarck having to leave a neutral port. Maybe you’re thinking of the CSS Alabama during the Civil War, not being able to linger in Cherbourg due to French neutrality?
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
I don’t remember the Bismarck having to leave a neutral port. Maybe you’re thinking of the CSS Alabama during the Civil War, not being able to linger in Cherbourg due to French neutrality?
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Tuckerfan]
And that, right there shows why it was Hollywood’s golden age. Yeah, the studios may have been cranking movies out like McDonald’s does hamburgers, but the people making the movies actually thought and cared about the job they were doing, and weren’t simply there for a paycheck. Nowadays, if they couldn’t figure out the ending, they’d just say, “Ah, have the effects guys just throw in a bunch of explosions. That’ll work.” They had a vision for how the film would turn out, and they had incredible limitations forced upon them, not merely technological, but also financial, so to get the film to work, they had to think things through, knowing they couldn’t simply punt with a bunch of fancy effects.
I’ll also say that most of the actors working today couldn’t hold a candle to the likes of Bogey, Raines, and Bergman (to name but a few in the cast).
[/QUOTE]
Exactly. The other thing that strikes me about this movie: it’s a great story, and you can let your kids watch it, No gory violence, no F-words and no boobs.
Don’t get me wrong, I like boobs as much as the next guy, but in the rush to get viewers, I feel the majority of the cussing, nudity and gore is simply not germane to the story.
