1942 | Poffy's Movie Mania

CASABLANCA

Poffy The Cucumber — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 09:05:09 +0000

We’ll Always Have Overacting.

Leonard Maltin calls CASABLANCA “The best Hollywood movie of all time”; it won the 1943 Best Picture Oscar; voted #2 film of all time by the American Film Institute; Roger Ebert effuses, “Casablanca is THE movie”; it boasts one of the most regal Hollywood stars in Ingrid Bergman (in the movie that would catapult her to stardom), and the cynical founder of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, Humphrey Bogart, one of the eras manly sex symbols, even though his face resembled the underside of a running shoe.

Some movies were great back then, and stay great: CITIZEN KANE, SEVEN SAMURAI, GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT. Poor CASABLANCA has dated badly – due to censorship at the time not allowing the filmmakers to solidly portray a married woman cheating, censorship on what could be shown onscreen to denote “passionate affair,” contention over the nihilistic lead character necessarily having a heart of gold, the faults go on… After decades of progress in American film, CASABLANCA, though it has insinuated itself into popular vernacular as a “great film,” is nothing more than a talky cardboard romance thriller, with overacting threatening to send us into a melodramatic swoon and enough soft-focus on Ingrid Bergman to make us cross-eyed.

During World War II, Rick (Bogart) and Ilsa (Bergman) had a steamy love affair in Paris, which involved lots of kissing with their mouths closed and lots of hugging with their clothes on. Years later, Rick runs a gin joint in Casablanca, The Café Americain, a stopover in Morocco for refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe on their way to America. It’s kinda like the Cantina in STAR WARS, except all the aliens are illegal. Peter Lorre cameos as Chewbacca, and Sam the piano player (Dooley Wilson) plays As Time Goes By by flapping his hands up and down on the keys like a seal. “You badly synched it for her, you can badly synch it for me.”

Play it for Poffy, schweetheart!

When Ilsa and her activist husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) seek egress through Casablanca to The States, they seek out Rick at his Café (“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks her pointy bra into mine”), knowing he has Letters of Transit that would confuse the Nazi stormtroopers hunting them due to Laszlo causing a great disturbance in the Resistance on Tattooine. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.”

And Rick and Ilsa reignite their love affair by meeting in dark rooms and talking a lot with their clothes on. Rick’s refrain, “We’ll always have Paris” makes us wonder why he doesn’t tear off her pointy bra and make Casablanca the new Paris. Everyone constantly drinking and smoking, yet no one ever gets drunk enough to have a Sexy Party. Censorship, thou frigid mistress.

Claude Rains is an unscrupulous, stylish weasel of a frog, a French officer who is nonchalantly AC/DC when it comes to helping either Rick or the Germans – whoever can benefit him the most. Conrad Veidt is Nazi Strasser, bedecked incorrectly in a Luftwaffe uniform.

Evidence abounds that CASABLANCA would not make it through today’s muster onto the silver screen. Based on the play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” imdb trivia tells us “in 1980 this script was sent to readers at a number of major studios and production companies under its original title. Some readers recognized the script but most did not. Many complained that the script was “not good enough” to make a decent movie. Others gave such complaints as “too dated,” “too much dialogue” and “not enough sex.””

According to actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, Bogart and Bergman themselves “thought the dialogue was ridiculous and the situations were unbelievable…” Yet the movie remains a classic for most film aficionados. Back when they were starstruck kids it was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Ah, to me, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill o’ beans in this crazy world.” I couldn’t have melodramatically said it better, Humphrey.

END

CASABLANCA (Nov 1942) | PG
aka: EVERYBODY COMES TO RICK’S.
Director: Michael Curtiz.
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Murray Burnett, Joan Alison.
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, S.Z. Sakall, Madeleine Lebeau, Dooley Wilson, Joy Page.

imdb
Word Count: 700 No. 544

ACADEMY AWARDS
1943
BEST PICTURE
BEST DIRECTOR
BEST SCREENPLAY

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THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON

Poffy The Cucumber — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:44:30 +0000

Dying is Easy, History is Hard.

History tells us General George Armstrong Custer was a murderer of men, women and children, usurper of land from Native Americans, dissolute breaker of treaties, leader of drunken degenerates, and kowtower to military butchers.

THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON tells us he was Errol Flynn.

Flynn plays Flynn playing Custer in this reimagining of merciless killer as noble hero, so Whitey white-white it turns albino even before we can start laughing at Errol’s effeteness.

Custer turns up at West Point Academy in 1857 (that timeless breeding ground for American military sociopaths), with a cape draped haughtily across one shoulder badder than any James Brown threw off to flame another yeeagh!, and a feather sticking out of his dandy military cap larger than any Freddie Mercury used on his Brazilian courtesans. Calling him gay-looking would be an insult to gay-looking people.

Film spends the next half hour establishing Custer as a Badboy: late for breakfast, singing after taps, insubordinate; a roarer, rogerer, bounder and puker; “…lowest marks and the highest demerits of any cadet who ever attended the academy, including Ulysses S. Grant… but he’s the best rider and the best soldier we have.”

Excuse the Paralogia Alert, but isn’t your own criteria for determining the worth of a soldier the marks and demerits he scores? Therefore, if he has scored the lowest marks and the highest demerits, pray tell WHAT OTHER CRITERIA ARE YOU MEASURING to determine he is the “best soldier you have”?! Oh, I forgot – he’s Errol Flynn.

And this film is all about The Errol, innit? Not about Custer, or Civil War battles, or illegal American Native murders; not even about revisionism – it’s about Errol being his dandy self (in soft focus whenever possible). One look at that devilishly Brylcreemed hair, pencil mustache and tart, pencil beard (unlike Custer’s actual mungabush) and it’s quite clear Mr. Flynn (and his agent) didn’t want ANYTHING obscuring that woman-magnet mug.

if you’re looking for an authentic biopic, look anywhere but here; on the other hand, if you’re looking for floosie fairy floss fantasy, feyer than Hannibal Lecter and Jack Sparrow at a Willy Wonka tea party – this is your biscuit. Now what say we remove all the murderous historical accuracies as well? For the laydayz.

Gen. George Armstrong Custer, and mungabush.

From Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown:

Custer’s orders from [General] Sheridan were explicit: “…to destroy their villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.”

In a matter of minutes Custer’s troopers destroyed Black Kettle’s village; in another few minutes of gory slaughter they destroyed by gunfire several hundred corralled ponies. To kill or hang all the warriors meant separating them from the old men, women and children. This work was too slow and dangerous for the cavalrymen; they found it much more efficient and safe to kill indiscriminately. They killed 103 Cheyennes, but only eleven of them were warriors. They captured 53 women and children.

Film goes overboard praising Custer’s rakish insubordination – but how insubordinate could he have been, to ultimately become a general? Here’s the kicker – when he is a general and his men start acting all naughty in their tight trousers and Brylcreem – exactly like he used to – he chides them for it, smashes up the pub and sulks like a big girl’s blouse!

Olivia de Havilland plays Elizabeth, some kind of retarded spinster– but she’s a white woman with slaves, how can she possibly be retarded? Allow me to cite just one example as evidence of her sloth of mind: Elizabeth and Custer meet-cute when he is on BREAKFAST CLUB detention, marching HUP and down the square. After flirty misunderstandings that will make you bilious, they set a date for that night. Custer stands her up. When her father criticizes Custer for being a scoundrel, she scolds him, “Don’t say that about the man I intend to marry!” I rest my case, Yeronner.

BOOTS is drenched in ingrained racism – regarded as “quaint” – that just doesn’t hold up in modern times. Academy Award-winning Hattie McDaniel (GONE WITH THE WIND, 1939) is Elizabeth’s slave; a real life band vocalist in the early 1900s, I guess if she wanted to be a film actress, she had to bend over and take it like a slave, so here, she uses that stunted vernacular that whites think blacks used back in the 1870s. And Mexican-born Anthony Quinn plays the one Native American they bothered to write into the script – Oglala war leader Crazy Horse, speaking in broken English, as only Hollywood thinks foreigners do, in yet another taken-for-granted gargantuan filmic insult to the original People of the Land.

More racism as Custer egregiously treats Crazy Horse like a retard: “Put him in the stockade for 60 days – maybe it’ll teach the boy a lesson!” The BOY? So they lock Crazy Horse away for stealing horses – the same horses the military just stole from the Land in the first place.

In BOOTS, Custer is portrayed as outraged when the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) are declared gold territory, in order to entice white settlers to invade Native territory insidiously. In real life, it was Custer who reported the ruse that the hills were “filled with gold from the grass roots down.”

For the purpose of keeping Errol sexy, Custer opines, “If I were an Indian I’d fight beside Crazy Horse to the last drop of my blood!” Sure you would, Jeff Foxworthy!

Gen. Philip Henry Sheridan, king bigot.

From Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown:

When he was presented to Sheridan, Tosawi’s eyes brightened. He spoke his own name and added two words of broken English. “Tosawi, good Indian,” he said.

It was then that General Sheridan uttered the immortal words: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Lieutenant Charles Nordstrom, who was present, remembered the words and passed them on, until in time they were honed into an American aphorism: The only good Indian is a dead Indian.

General Sheridan was Custer’s contemporary and superior. The meme of the “good Injun dead Injun” was struck through the American military. Custer thought no different.

With gallant and dandy and foppish meters redlining, the battle scenes are ineffectual at best, muddled incomprehensibly at worst. “To the devil with the orders – we’ll ride to the sound of the guns!” I dare say, what valor! We see Custer get stabbed at the Battle of Little Bighorn, last man standing – but no one knows how Custer bought it or when. Why stop making stuff up now?

The filmmakers really try to be sincere in their objectivity. They fail, of course, but at least they insert a modicum of self-aware lines like, “The only real Americans in this battle are on the other side of the hill with feathers in their hair”; a Brit asks Custer, “What do you Yankees think you are – but foreigners yourselves?!”

Custer says to an entrepreneur rival, “You may be right about money – but there’s one thing to be said for glory: you can take glory with you when it’s time for you to go.”

Even if you don’t deserve it in the least, you pompous swine.

END

THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON (Jan 1942) | Approved
aka: TO THE LAST MAN.
Director: Raoul Walsh.
Writers: Wally Kline, Aeneas MacKenzie, Lenore J. Coffee
Starring: Errol Flynn, Olivia De Havilland, Arthur Kennedy, Charley Grapewin, Gene Lockhart, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Ridges, John Litel, Walter Hampden, Sydney Greenstreet, Regis Toomey, Hattie McDaniel.

imdb
Word Count: 1,370 No. 484

Back Dat Custard Ass Up.
The American Natives called Custer “Hard Backsides” because he chased them for long distances without leaving his saddle. Then they called him Long Hair Custer. If Errol’s foppy performance is any indication of the man, it’s surprising they didn’t start calling him Gaywad Custer, or something else to do with his backside.

Revising the true Revisionists.
The westerns of the early 1990s were called “revisionist” (DANCES WITH WOLVES, UNFORGIVEN, LAST OF THE MOHICANS) when it was really the westerns of the 30s, 40s and 50s that revised actual history into Hollywood tropes – all from the White Eyes’ P.O.V.

So though the so-called “revisionists” were trying to regain some semblance of realism and balance, even the term itself slanted the discussion, implying that those early westerns were the “real” or “true” version of The Old West, and the “revisionists” were renegades, when in fact, the revisionists were trying to push back on 60 years of actual revisionists.

BOOTS is one of the worst cases of those actual revisionists.

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