Tonight I watched Casablanca for the fourth time and Singin' in the Rain for the third time.
Anyone else here love either of these films? I'd say the former cracks my top 50 favorite films, and the latter cracks my top 10.
For context, I've seen around 1,650 films.
Both great films yeah. Well
Singing in the Rain is a lot better than I expected with more to it than I'd assumed before I saw it. As discussed it's a big influence on
Babylon, though I think the people I saw it with didn't realize the parallels until it was made explicit at the end. I think it's no longer a touchstone which people instantly recognize in the way it was once. No longer part of the vocabulary of film that you can just assume everyone is aware of - my friend actually studied film I think but he didn't know that it was about the advent of talkies, and so when the chorus sang
Singing in the Rain he didn't see immediately that it was directly relevant to what was happening in
Babylon as one was supposed to.
I love
Casablanca and I think that that IS still part of, quite literally, the vocabulary of cinema in that it is stuffed with all these very famous and quotable lines (and one of the most famous misquotes in "play it again Sam") that everyone knows even if they haven't seen the film. This sometimes works to the detriment of the film as you're constantly being distracted from the actual dialogue by quotes you've seen plucked out of the script and highlighted or cast in bronze. They are like statues and so it's hard to put them back and see them as parts of a living conversation.
Stan, did you see me talking about a film - I think it was actually just called
Havana - which felt as though it were almost a remake of
Casablanca but moved to the Cuban party town on the eve of revolution. Robert Redford plays a gambler who gets mixed up with a woman who has to choose between him and a revolutionary hero.
One might say that it's not the plot that makes
Casablanca good but rather the acting, the dialogue, the setting etc so what's the point of throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater, and it's a valid question, but the unofficial remake is ok in its own right.