Actually, the French film critics through the “golden years” of Hollywood were the peak period for auteur directors.
Honest? About what? No slicker movie came down the pike than GWTW. And if you consider American History X a “slick Hollywood product”, than I think you may need to get out of French Morocco a bit more.
I wouldn’t consider anything about Casablanca mediocre–except the boiler plate melodrama framework. But that matters little (hey, Romeo & Juliet is standard “boy meets girl” by those standards)–it’s all about the execution, and the screenplay alone brings the film far above a glib write-off as smoke-and-mirrors “manipulative filmmaking” (a redundant term if I’ve ever heard one).
So many reasons - everything seems to work; the script, the casting, directing, sets, music, mood, lighting, attitude and the underlying message of good conquering evil, even on a small scale, even if it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
It is like a time capsule, where even the ending of the script was uncertain until the last moment - capturing the urgency and unknown of a real war that was still going on at the time.
The film is my psychological comfort food, one of the few films I can watch over and over again.
American History X merits its own thread, but it is the very definition of sweet nothings, IMHO.
GWTW was a more developed storyline, IMHO, and had a more nuanced love, once again IMHO. Slick, yes. But the lead characters had more depth.
Uh, you may want to look up a guy named Budd Schulberg (Oscar-winner, Best Screenplay) and his experience with the HUAC before you state that Waterfront was “uniquely” Kazan’s.
Hmm. Struggling to grasp your viewpoint, Ilsa: GWTW is the apex of cheap Hollywood schlock, if you ask me, while AHX, though certainly not 100% successful, took some chances and pushed some envelopes. You’d have to throw a pretty wide net around Hollywood, as a concept, to reel in AHX along with GWTW.
ArchiveGuy - The mise en scene of OTW was uniquely Kazan.
lis - Schlock-ish; yes. Slick; yes. But I believe that the characters and the love of the leads was developed better than Casablanca. That is my only point. Casablance is, however, more sentimental.
Not to mention that calling an independent film–whose entire budget is half of what Jim Carrey pulls in per film–a “slick Hollywood” product strikes me as absurd. Pop quiz: What was the last “slick Hollywood” film with an ex-Nazi as a hero that talked about politics and race relations as pervasively as AHX? Call it naive, reductive, pretentious, or preachy, but “slick” (which usually suggests pandering to commercialism)? I wouldn’t.
Uh, you may be forgetting another Oscar-winner, cinematographyer Boris Kaufman. The great thing about film as a collaborative medium is that films are rarely “uniquely” anybody’s.
Well, GWTW’s characters encounter a much wider range of experiences than do Casablanca’s, and exhibit a wider range of emotion. I think they were trying to make Ilsa an enigma, and succeeded only in making her a paper cutout, though an extremely effective (not to mention quite cute) one.
IMHO, Scarlett is more human than Ilsa. But my username is not Scarlett_OHara.
The filmmaking was slick. Tony Kaye was a television commercial director, for God’s sake! Not to mention the ending was a non-sequitur copout. [/HIJACK RE: AHX]
I know it sounded condescending, but I decided to preemptively apologize for sounding condescending would sound even more condescending, so I let it fly as is.
My main point is this: as snobby and elitist as I may get about movies (and I do, I do), I never say anything like “the Xth greatest film ever made”; I only ever say things “my all-time favorite films” etc.
It just brings me up short reading a thread like this, seeing a phrase like yours; I have an involuntary reaction of “Well, I doubt if he’s seen every film ever made, so how can he make such a claim?”
I guess I was just expressing a pet peeve of art discussions.
Well, I just finished it on my new DVD, and I figure I’ll go over it again.
Occasionally hammy in the extreme, it is standarf (though high-class) Warner fare for the time.
I stand by my initial assesment of Curtiz’ direction: pedestrian and uninspired, I think better direction would have improved the film. Soft focus is way overused.
Music harps way too much on the ‘As time goes by’ theme. The love story is ggod, though I like GWTW’s love triangle better (and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, more on that.). An excellent film altogether, though not a cinematic masterpiece. To answer my original question, a classic American piece up with Frank Capra’s films. An enduring classic, to be sure.
I couldn’t help but think that in many ways it is similar to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I love that film beyond rational inquiry. Though the sum of the parts of Casblanca is greater than Tiffany’s, in some respects (emotions, acting, love) I think Tiffany’s tops it. I bring it up because of similar storylines, though it did not strike me until rewatching the film.
I’m sorry to bump this (ok, I’m not) but I just realized, after watching with Roger Ebert’s commentary that the studio-system cheesiness, the stiffness, all adds to the movie’s charm and makes me, at least, appreciate it more.
