Word: ricks
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...still the same old story. The Lisbon plane always descends like a kid's toy landing on the living-room rug. Stick-figure Nazis in animal faces (Strasser a wolf, his aide a fat little pig in glasses) come strutting off. That night at Rick's they chorus Die Wacht am Rhein, the stein-swinging bully song that is the Nazis' idea of a good time in a nightclub. The defiantly answering Marseillaise stirs the soul and raises its Pavlovian goose bumps for the 15th time. They still pronounce "exit visa" weirdly: "exit...
...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...
Semioticians, who study the significance of signs and symbols, have discussed Casablanca as a myth of sacrifice. One can have fun with that. Consider it this way: America is the Promised Land, the place of safety and redemption. Rick Blaine has been cast out of America, for some original sin that is as obscure as the one that cost Adam and Eve their Eden. Rick flees to Europe, which is the fallen world where Evil (the Nazis, Satan) is loose. He meets and beds the widow of Idealism. Idealism (meaning Victor) is dead, or thought dead, but it rises from...
...Rick's Café Americain is the state of the stateless. Rick sets himself up as a kind of chieftain or caliph in his isolated, autonomous, amoral fiefdom, where he rules absolutely. Victor and Rick are splintered aspects, it may be, of the same man. Ultimately, the ego rises above mere selfish despair and selfish desire. It is reborn in sacrifice and community: "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill o' beans in this crazy world." Idealism and its bride ascend into heaven...
...RARIFIED CULTURAL ATMOSPHERE of Cambridge, it is hard to praise a street movie like 48 Hours. You sound mean and hissing, like Peter Lorre. "But 'low-brow trash' is such an ugly word. I prefer to call it 'escapism'. You despise me, Rick, don't you?" On the other hand, it is necessary to distinguish intelligently among Hollywood's blood'n' guts action offerings...