Casablanca

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

Karolyn Grimes looks back on her role as Zuzu in It’s a Wonderful Life

The title tells it all. It’s a Wonderful Life was first released back in December 1946, in the same week that President Truman was issuing Proclamation 2714, which officially ended hostilities in World War Two, and for that matter prefiguring Donald Trump by proposing that the US buy Greenland. The movie may be seventy-eight years old, but it’s one of those timeless classics, like Casablanca or The Searchers, that actually improve with familiarity. It’s also long since woven its essential message of good cheer into the fabric of our festive season. It’s an unusual plot for a film synonymous with feel-good family entertainment.

it's a wonderful life

Monday

Alexander Larman

There’s more to Bordeaux than fine wine

In the seminal Casablanca, there is a classic moment when the Humphrey Bogart character is asked how he ended up there. Bogie, doing laconic and world-weary as only he could, replies, “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.” When Claude Rains’s iconic Captain Renault purrs, “Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert!” Bogart’s response is simple. “I was misinformed.” This exchange occurred to me when I recently visited Bordeaux, a city with awe-inspiringly beautiful architecture, some of France’s most stylish places to shop and eat, situated teasingly close to the beaches of the Atlantic coast. Yet if you attempted to tell anyone that you’d come to Bordeaux for history, couture or coastline, you’d get the Bordeaux version of “What waters?

Bordeaux

Tuesday

Roger Lewis

Complicated and slightly creepy: the Bogart-Bacall romance

From our UK edition

Whenever an actor and an actress begin an affair on the soundstage they like to believe they are the new Burton and Taylor. Actually they’ll be lucky to resemble Christopher Timothy and Carol Drinkwater, who had a fling on that vet programme – and now here are Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall to live up to as well. Of their love story, William J. Mann avers: ‘It was wonderful; it was passionate; it was complicated.’ Also, it was creepy. Bacall was 19, Bogart 45. There was a ‘significant power differential between them’ when they met in 1944 during the filming of To Have and Have Not. Mann is probably pointing the finger at Bogart, the established Hollywood star.

Sunday

Peter Tonguette

At eighty, Casablanca embodies Hollywood high style

In considering what makes a masterpiece of film, the critical community has its shortlist of highly artistic favorites: Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Battleship Potemkin, the like. But in the hearts and minds of average moviegoers, another kind of picture has come to encapsulate “the big screen”: one with less aesthetic ambition, perhaps, but an exceptional dose of romance and style. For this set, Casablanca remains something like the main attraction. Eighty years ago this November, Warner Bros.

casablanca

Thursday

Tanya Gold

In praise of character actors

From our UK edition

The star system is a false hierarchy: the best rarely make it to the top. I thought of this recently when it was announced that David Warner had died. Few outside acting could name him, though you may have seen his head flying off in The Omen, a film in which heads are cheap. Warner was a Manchester-born jobbing actor: a character actor, better defined by what he is not, which was a star. I could write pages about why a star is a star, and a character actor remains a character actor, but the most significant reason is simple. Warner was brilliant but he was not handsome.