February 2021
The Valentine Fix From Fix A round up and review of some star crossed classics. — McCartney Fix, Co-News Editor
“Casablanca” Dir. Michael Curtiz
Photo sourced from Alternate Movie Posters
A gorgeous, black and white alternative poster depicting the final gazed shared between the lovers
Feature 12
It is strange to think about Casablanca in any way other than saying, “duh, it is Casablanca”. Often films accumulate such an impact on popular culture, and find such success in scholarship and academia, that talking about them as ‘movies’ is weird! But yes, Casablanca continues to be one of the best, no matter its enormous popularity and influence. It is a ravishing studio-backlot wartime romance that practically leaps off the screen with the help of Bogart’s existential pain rendered physical and Bergman’s angelic close-ups. If this movie were made today, it would be a plodding 2 hours and twenty minutes of clumsy set-up and obvious screenwriting. Casablanca was initially not intended to be a critically renowned masterwork to which all future romances were compared, it was a contractually obligated studio piece, in the vein of any other dime a dozen tragic romance the early post silent era of cinema pumped out. In the hands of Michael Curtiz, however, its simple premise is made truly transformative, playing brilliantly off of the deceptive simplicity of its premise. A man loves and then loses a woman, becoming an emotional recluse until she re-enters his life, years later, fates intertwined on a scale broader now than a simple romance; it would be laughably cliche if its tantalizing promise wasn’t so expertly executed upon. For a film of its day, the script remains tight, only occasionally falling victim to the retrospective parodies of its most iconic turns of phrase. 78 years of riffing on “here is looking at you kid” and “we will always have Paris” makes it difficult not to roll one’s eyes upon hearing them, particularly with how much they are used throughout the film, but when deployed tactfully, and with their fullest emotional weight, Curtiz lands a gut punch. The conclusion, when experienced blind, is a treat, one of the finest conclusory sequences ever put to film, the reels bleed with emotion as Bogart and Bergman put a tortured face to the poetry they perform, left only with questions of what could have been, and those fateful memories of Paris.
