Word: casablanca
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More people know more lines from Casablanca, possibly, than from any other movie. They recite the best ones. They splash around in the sentimentality. They sing along in the way that Churchill used to rumble the lines of Hamlet from his seat in the audience at the Old Vic. They stooge around: imagine Howard Cosell in the part of Rick Blaine and recite the lines in Cosellian cadence: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine...
...Round up the usual suspects . . . We'll always have Paris. It has inspired bits of business: Sydney Greenstreet bowing graciously to Ingrid Bergman in the Blue Parrot and then with brutal abstraction swatting a fly, which for the instant becomes the moral equivalent of any refugee in Casablanca. Or the alltime triumphant moment of literal-minded symbol-banging exposition: Claude Rains dropping the bottle of Vichy Water into a wastebasket and giving it a kick, the charming collaborator virtuous at last...
...Casablanca is, among other things, a fable of citizenship and idealism, the duties of the private self in the dangerous public world. It is a thoroughly escapist myth about getting politically involved. Perhaps today the escapism overwhelms the idea of commitment. Local TV stations run Casablanca on election nights, so that Americans can avoid watching news reports about their democracy in action...
...concoct mock-academic theories about Casablanca. One can lay the sweet thing down on a stainless-steel lab table and dissect it with instruments Freudian or anthropological. A doctoral thesis might be written on the astonishing consumption of alcohol and cigarettes in the movie. At that rate, everyone would have died of cirrhosis and lung cancer...
Another paper might examine Casablanca as the ultimate rationalization of, and sublimation of, adultery. One woman, two men. Woman has affair with man not her husband. But wait: it's all right, she thought the husband was dead. And these are desperate times, good and evil are clashing everywhere. A woman can get confused...