Bruger:Malou/Tegnebrættet/Kladde

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Indholdsfortegnelse

[redigér] Writing

The original play was inspired by a 1938 trip to Europe by Murray Burnett, during which he visited Vienna shortly after the Anschluss, as well as the south coast of France, which had uneasily coexisting populations of Nazis and refugees. The latter locale provided the inspirations for both Rick's cafe (the nightclub Le Kat Ferrat) and the character of Sam (a black piano player Burnett saw in Juan-les-Pins). In the play, the Ilsa character was an American named Lois Meredith and did not meet Laszlo until after her relationship with Rick in Paris had ended; Rick was a lawyer.

The first main writers to work on the script for Warners were the Epstein twins (Julius and Philip), who removed Rick's background and added more elements of comedy. The other credited writer, Howard Koch, joined later, but worked in parallel with the Epsteins, despite their differing emphases (Koch highlighting the political and melodramatic elements). Important scenes were also added by the uncredited Casey Robinson, who contributed the series of meetings between Rick and Ilsa in the cafe. Curtiz seems to have favoured the romantic elements, insisting on retaining the flashback Paris scenes. One of the most famous lines— "here's looking at you"— is not in the draft screenplays, and has been attributed to the poker lessons Bogart was giving Bergman in between takes.[1] The final line of the film was written by Wallis after shooting had been completed, and film critic Roger Ebert calls Wallis the "key creative force" for his attention to the details of production (down to insisting on a real parrot in the Blue Parrot bar).[2]

Despite the many different writers, the film has what Ebert describes as a "wonderfully unified and consistent" script. Koch later said that it was the tension between his own approach and that of Curtiz which accounted for this: "surprisingly, these disparate approaches somehow meshed, and perhaps it was partly this tug of war between Curtiz and me that gave the film a certain balance".[3] Julius Epstein would later note that the screenplay contained "more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there's nothing better."[4]

The film ran into some trouble from Joseph Breen of the Production Code Administration (the Hollywood self-censorship body), who opposed the suggestions that Captain Renault extorted sexual favours from his supplicants and that Rick and Ilsa had slept together in Paris. Both, however, remained strongly implied in the finished version.

[redigér] Direction

Wallis' first choice for director was William Wyler, but when Wyler was unavailable, Wallis turned to his close friend Michael Curtiz.[5] Curtiz was a Hungarian Jewish emigre; he had come to the U.S. in the 1920s, but some of his family were refugees from Nazi Europe. Roger Ebert has commented that in Casablanca "very few shots ... are memorable as shots", Curtiz being concerned to use images to tell the story rather than for their own sake.[2] However, he had relatively little input into the development of the plot: Casey Robinson said that Curtiz "knew nothing whatever about story... he saw it in pictures, and you supplied the stories".[6] Critic Andrew Sarris called the film "the most decisive exception to the auteur theory",[7] to which Aljean Harmetz responded that, "nearly every Warner Bros. picture was an exception to the auteur theory".[8] Other critics give more credit to Curtiz: Sidney Rosenweig, in his study of the director's work, sees the film as a typical example of Curtiz's highlighting of moral dilemmas.[9]

The second unit montages, such as the opening sequence of the refugee trail and that showing the invasion of France, were directed by Don Siegel.[10]

[redigér] Cinematography

The Cross of Lorraine, emblem of the Free French
Forstør
The Cross of Lorraine, emblem of the Free French

The cinematographer was Arthur Edeson, a veteran who had previously shot The Maltese Falcon and Frankenstein. Particular attention was paid to photographing Bergman: she was shot mainly from her preferred left side, often with a softening gauze filter and with catch lights to make her eyes sparkle. The whole effect was designed to make her face seem "ineffably sad and tender and nostalgic".[2] Bars of shadow across the characters and in the background variously imply imprisonment, the crucifix, the Free French symbol and emotional turmoil.[2]

Dark film noir and expressionist lighting is used in several scenes, particularly towards the end of the picture. Rosenzweig argues that these shadow and lighting effects are classic elements of the Curtiz style, along with the fluid camera work and the use of the environment as a framing device.[11]

[redigér] Music

The score was written by Max Steiner, who was best known for the musical score for Gone with the Wind. The song "As Time Goes By" by Herman Hupfeld had been part of the story from the original play; Steiner wanted to write his own song to replace it, but he had to abandon his plan because Bergman had already cut her hair short for her next role and could not re-shoot the scenes which mentioned the song. So Steiner based the entire score on it (and "La Marseillaise"), transforming them to reflect the changing moods of the movie.[12] Particularly notable is the "duel of the songs", in which "La Marseillaise" is played by a full orchestra rather than just the small band actually present in Rick's club, competing against the Germans singing "Die Wacht am Rhein" at the piano. Other songs include "It Had to Be You" from 1924 with lyrics by Gus Kahn and music by Isham Jones, "Knock on Wood" with music by M.K. Jerome and lyrics by Jack Scholl and Shine from 1910 by Cecil Mack and Lew Brown with music by Ford Dabney.

[redigér] Reception

Reaction to the film at previews before release was described as "beyond belief". It premiered at the Hollywood Theater in New York City on November 26 1942, to coincide with the Allied invasion of North Africa and the capture of Casablanca; it went into general release on January 23 1943, to take advantage of the Casablanca conference, a high-level meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in the city. It was a substantial but not spectacular box-office success, taking $3.7 million on its initial U.S. release (making it the seventh best-selling film of 1943).[13] Initial critical reaction was generally positive, with Variety describing it as "splendid anti-Axis propaganda"; as Koch later said, "it was a picture the audiences needed... there were values... worth making sacrifices for. And it said it in a very entertaining way." Other reviews were less enthusiastic: The New Yorker rated it only "pretty tolerable".[14] The Office of War Information prevented screening of the film to troops in North Africa, believing it would cause resentment among Vichy supporters in the region.[15]

The film's theme song, "As Time Goes By", enjoyed its own success, spending 21 weeks on the hit parade. At the 1944 Oscars, the film won three awards, for best screenplay, best director, and best picture. Wallis' resentment when Jack Warner rather than he collected the best picture award led to the severing of ties between him and the studio in April that year.[16]

The film has maintained its popularity: Murray Burnett has called it "true yesterday, true today, true tomorrow". By 1955 the film had brought in $6.8 million dollars, although this still left it only the third most successful of Warners' wartime movies (behind Shine On, Harvest Moon and This is the Army).[17] On April 21 1957, the Brattle Theater of Cambridge, Massachusetts showed the film as part of a season of old movies. It was so popular that it began a tradition of screening Casablanca during the week of final exams at Harvard University which continues to the present day, and it is emulated by many colleges across the United States. Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology who himself attended one of these screenings, had said that the experience was, "the acting out of my own personal rite of passage".[18] The tradition helped the movie remain popular while other famous films of the 1940s have faded away, and by 1977 Casablanca was the most frequently broadcast film on American television.[19]

However, there has been anecdotal evidence that Casablanca may have made a deeper impression among film-lovers than within the professional movie-making establishment. In the November/December 1982 issue of "American Film", Chuck Ross claimed that he had retyped the screenplay to Casablanca, using the play title Everybody Comes to Ricks; submitting it to 217 agencies. 85 of them read it, of which 38 rejected it outright, 33 generally recognized it (but only eight specifically as Casablanca), three declared it commercially viable, and one suggested turning it into a novel.

[redigér] Critical response

Critics have subjected Casablanca to many different readings. William Donelley, in his Love and Death in Casablanca, argues that Rick's relationship with Sam, and subsequently with Renault, is, "a standard case of the repressed homosexuality that underlies most American adventure stories".[20] Harvey Greenberg presents a Freudian reading in his The Movies on Your Mind, in which the transgressions which prevent Rick from returning to the US constitute an Oedipus complex, which is resolved only when Rick begins to identify with the father figure of Laszlo and the cause which he represents.[21] Sidney Rosenzweig argues that such readings are reductive, and that the most important aspect of the film is its ambiguity, above all in the central character of Rick; he cites the different names which each character gives Rick (Richard, Ricky, Mr Rick, Herr Blaine and so on) as evidence of the different meanings which he has for each person.[22]

Roger Ebert has claimed that the film is "probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane", because of its wider appeal; while Citizen Kane is "greater", Casablanca is more loved.[2] Behlmer also emphasises the variety in the picture: "it’s a blend of drama, melodrama, comedy [and] intrigue". Ebert says that he has never heard of a negative review of the film, even though individual elements can be criticised (he cites the unrealistic special effects and the stiff character/portrayal of Laszlo).[6]

Ebert has also said that the film is popular because "the people in it are all so good". As the Resistance hero, Laszlo is ostensibly the most noble, although he is so stiff that he is hard to like.[2] The other characters, in Rudy Behlmer's words, are "not cut and dried": they come into their goodness in the course of the film. Renault begins the film as a collaborator with the Nazis, who extorts sexual favours from refugees and has Ugarte killed. Rick, according to Behlmer, is "not a hero, ... not a bad guy": he does what is necessary to get along with the authorities and "sticks his neck out for nobody". Even Ilsa, the least active of the main characters, is "caught in the emotional struggle" over which man she really loves. By the end of the film, however, "everybody is sacrificing".

A dissenting note comes from Umberto Eco, who wrote that "by any strict critical standards... Casablanca is a very mediocre film". He sees the changes the characters undergo as inconsistency rather than complexity: "It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects". However, he argues that it is this inconsistency which accounts for the film's popularity by allowing it to include a whole series of archetypes: unhappy love, flight, passage, waiting, desire, the triumph of purity, the faithful servant, the love triangle, beauty and the beast, the enigmatic woman, the ambiguous adventurer and the redeemed drunkard. Centermost is the idea of sacrifice: "the myth of sacrifice runs through the whole film".[23]

[redigér] Influence

Many subsequent films have drawn on elements of Casablanca: Passage to Marseille reunited Bogart, Rains, Curtiz, Greenstreet and Lorre in 1944, while there are many similarities between Casablanca and a later Bogart film, Sirocco. Parodies have included the Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca (1946), Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam (1972), and Barb Wire (1996), while it provided the title for the 1995 hit The Usual Suspects. Warner Brothers produced its own parody of the film in Carrotblanca, a 1995 Bugs Bunny cartoon. This is included on the special edition DVD release. The website angryalien.com produced a remake of Casablanca in its 30-Second Bunnies Theater.