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Comment on Casablanca: How an unproduced play marched into movie history

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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.

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".

(Edit: according to Phil Tippett who did the initial character design for the RotJ Jabba puppet, when he asked Lucas directly "if there was an actor that was going to play Jabba the Hutt, who would it be?" Lucas answered "Sydney Greenstreet". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GXrQ-L-ROs&t=599s )

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.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”

I don’t about best of all time but it sure is outstanding.

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

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

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

I watched The Shining for the first time about 15 years ago (at about age 30) and when my friend asked what I thought I said it was good, but seemed pretty typical of horror films, to which he pointed out that it’s because all those films were inspired by The Shining.

Was it the beginning of a beautiful friendship, by any chance?

Surely they were in all but name. People say “play it again, Sam” and are “shocked. Shocked!” to this day. It’s easy to imagine the cultural dominance at its heyday.

People say “play it again, Sam”

So, they haven't watched Casablanca?

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