Casablanca: How an unproduced play marched into movie history

compiler-guy•about 1 hour ago

I once saw Casablanca with a friend who hadn’t seen it, and she said, “Wow. This movie jam packed with cliches. It’s off putting. Wait. This is the source of all the cliches isn’t it?”

Which it is. One of the most quotable movies of all time. If memes were a thing in 1942, it would have been the king. Still quotable today.

leoc•about 1 hour ago

One thing that the Special Edition did for Star Wars was make clear that it had borrowed the Humphrey Bogart and "Little Pete[r Lorre]-Big Syd[ney Greenstreet]" characters which came from The Maltese Falcon via Casablanca. Sam Spade-Rick Blaine-Han Solo; Casper Gutman-Signor Ferrari-Jabba the Hutt (original version); Joel Cairo-Ugarte-Greedo; and of course they're fighting over a celebrated artificial "Falcon".

snarf21•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, this is the greatest movie of all time and I don't think it is even close. No other movie covers everything it is to be human and in such a sometimes subtle way.

agonz253•42 minutes ago

There’s no such thing as the greatest movie of all time.

cwmoore•37 minutes ago

Technically, maybe there was, when Muybridge was also the greatest director, in 1880:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_in_Motion

thejazzman•about 1 hour ago

It’s never too late..

https://amphetamem.es/?q=Casablanca

gramie•about 1 hour ago

I have probably watched this movie a dozen times, and I delight in all the tiny, barely-acknowledged references throughout.

The Italian and French soldiers walking into the bar, and the Italian not able to get a word in edgewise.

The German couple saying, "Leibchen, what watch is it?" "Six watch" "Such watch" because that is the literal translation into English of the German "uhr".

The singing of "La Marseillaise" by extras who were mostly themselves refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe -- the emotion was real.

I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. "Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid," it always began. (Rick is calling Ilsa a whore.)

Every scene is a gem.

diego_moita•26 minutes ago

The Italian author Umberto Eco had an interesting explanation on why he likes Casablanca[1] : no other movie was able to pack so many cliches together. It is like a whole cathedral of standard myths.

[1] https://biblioklept.org/2013/05/26/casablanca-or-the-cliches...

Casablanca: How an unproduced play marched into movie history

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