Now hang on a second, I don’t think it’s right to dismiss the OP so quickly, especially without giving some more concrete counter-examples. For most of us, the only pre-70’s (or even pre-60’s) movies we’re exposed to are Hays Code ones, and then on top of that the ones that are deemed “family-friendly” enough to be shown repeatedly. It’s a completely understandable, and common, misconception that movies of that time period really reflected people’s values.
Look at The Public Enemy. Cagney comes off as more of a delinquent than a gangster, and the only non-grapefruit-related violence is of the “bang! you’re dead!” variety. But every time I’ve seen it, it’s been presented in a nostalgic context, as in “This is what people of the time really thought life as a gangster was like.”
Anyway, I had the same reaction as the OP the first time I saw His Girl Friday. Here was a movie with an intelligent, competent, professional, divorced (!!) woman who could hold her own against any man but was still feminine. A movie with an “anti-hero” who’s basically corrupt and spends most of the movie using his ties to try and get his ex-wife’s fiance (and his mother!) arrested. A comedy that talks about the death penalty. Subtle in-jokes about the movie’s stars. And it was made in 1940! Before I saw it, I had no idea that people even knew how to make movies like that back then.
For what it’s worth, I agree with astro. I’ve seen my fair share of movies from this era and this is one of the few that struck me as being really laugh-out-loud funny.
I’ve been slowly making progress on watching all of AFI’s top 100 comedies. But while I appreciate most of them, some of the older ones don’t make me laugh like the more contemporary ones do. I’d like to think I’m as sophisticated a viewer as the next guy, but some of the classics (Philadelphia Story, or His Girl Friday for instance) just don’t make me laugh like I thought they would. I liked and appreciated them, but for sheer yuks, not so much.
Casablanca feels different. The humor feels, for lack of a better word, timeless to me and makes me laugh out loud like so many of my contemporary favorites. Maybe the writing is just a little sharper or the deliveries better timed, but whatever it is, it clearly stands out from the crowd.
As a disclaimer, I am also a big fan of Chaplain and Keaton’s silent films, but Casablanca is so different in it’s sensibilities it’s hard to compare.
For what it’s worth, I agree with astro. I’ve seen my fair share of movies from this era and this is one of the few that struck me as being really laugh-out-loud funny.
I’ve been slowly making progress on watching all of AFI’s top 100 comedies. But while I appreciate most of them, some of the older ones don’t make me laugh like the more contemporary ones do. I’d like to think I’m as sophisticated a viewer as the next guy, but some of the classics (Philadelphia Story, or His Girl Friday for instance) just don’t make me laugh like I thought they would. I liked and appreciated them, but for sheer yuks, not so much.
Casablanca feels different. The humor feels, for lack of a better word, timeless to me and makes me laugh out loud like so many of my contemporary favorites. Maybe the writing is just a little sharper or the deliveries better timed, but whatever it is, it clearly stands out from the crowd.
As a disclaimer, I am also a big fan of Chaplain and Keaton’s silent films, but Casablanca is so different in it’s sensibilities it’s hard to compare.
Perhaps it’s better to describe Claude Rains’ character as ‘camp’. He played quite a few campish characters in his time (eg Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood) and it was quite common for Hollywood films to have characters who displayed lots of camp characteristics to be otherwise completely heterosexual. It was a kind of complex sexual coding that wasn’t really examined at the time. And the relationship between Rains’ character and Rick is kinda slashy. But I tend to think that it’s a kind of metaphor for American-European relationships at the time, so their beautiful friendship at the end is beyond gender.
I think the OP has hit the nail on the head about a certain atmosphere in Casablanca, though, as has been noted, there were loads of films before it with a far more ‘modern’ sense of humour. I think Casablanca was one of the first films to directly address the cynicism of war from America’s point of view and it has a world-weariness that is unique. It is this kind of atmosphere that got translated into later film noirs although, because they were generally more serious and less philosophical, they don’t have the same humour.
IMHO, of course.
(BTW, can I just say that Claude Rains is my absolute favourite actor ever and I adore posting about him. He is wonderful in Casablanca but catch him in Mr Skeffington, The Invisible Man and Now, Voyager, too.)
Sorry, but a lot of what may seem original in “Casablanca” shows up time and time again in earlier films.
In Top Hat and Swing Time, for instance, Helen Broderick makes plenty of cynical wisecracks that wouldn’t be out of place in a movie today. Another Astaire/Rogers comedy (maybe Swing Time has sly references to homosexuality (especially through Edward Everett Horton, who was gay).
Sexual references abound, both pre-code and post. They were just more subtle. There was the famous line in 42nd Street:
Less famous is the delightfully sly exchange in the film:
A bit subtle (think about it), quite modern.
Granted, Casablanca had a lot of great lines (and Raines had many of them), but they weren’t all that different in concept than many other previous films.
Yeah… watch some Marx Brothers, at least up to “Night at the Opera”. Duck Soup has some of the most scathing political commentary and fall off of your chair humour that you will find anywhere.
To echo the thoughts of many others in this thread, I don’t really see anything earthshattering in the “modern-ness” of Casablanca. I think many people have an assumption that films made back in the '30s & '40s were more quaint & naive than more recent films. I’ll bet that people with this assumption haven’t actually seen very many movies from this era. Check out 1931’s The Front Page for instance.
And as for your other question, I’m also in the camp of those who feel there was a homosexual subtext to the relationship b/t Renault & Rick. Once you’re aware of it, it’s hard to see their interplay as anything but flirting. There are so many clues that point to a subtle homosexuality–certain lines of dialogue, mannerisms, his speech, etc.
In fact, one of my favorite moments is when the young Hungarian woman pleads with Rick to help her & her husband gain safe passage. She mentions that her husband has had to approach Renault directly, and Rick–knowing full well what this entails replies: “I see Renualt has become broad-minded”!!! What a classic line!!!