What's on
Cine Real hosts regular 16mm film screenings in London with rare prints and real film projection.
THIS MONTH:
Love is in the air at Cine Real this February with two classics from different eras of the romantic spectrum lighting up the screen at The Castle Cinema.
Thursday 12th February
Thursday 19th February
Sunday 22nd February
All screenings are introduced by the Cine Real team, celebrating cinematic romance and a tribute to the late, great, Rob Reiner.
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY (1989)
“When Harry Met Sally…” is a love story with a form as old as the movies and dialogue as new as this month’s issue of Vanity Fair.
It’s about two people who could be characters in a Woody Allen movie, if they weren’t so sunny, and about how it takes them 12 years to fall in love. We’re with them, or maybe a little ahead of them, every step of the way.
Harry meets Sally for the first time at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1977, when they team up to share the driving for a trip to New York. Both plan to start their careers in the city – she as a journalist, he as a political consultant. Presumably they are both successful, because they live in those apartments that only people in the movies can afford, but their professional lives are entirely off-screen. We see them only at those intervals when they see each other.
They meet, for example, several years later, at LaGuardia Airport.
She’s with a new boyfriend. They meet again after that, when they’re both in relationships, and after that, when her boyfriend has left and his wife wants a divorce. They keep on meeting until they realize that they like one another, and they become friends – even though on their very first cross-country trip, Harry warned Sally that true friendship is impossible between a man and a woman, because the issue of sex always gets in the way.
The movie apparently believes that – and it also suggests that the best way to get rid of sex as an issue is to get married, since married people always seem too tired for sex. That and other theories about sex and relationships are tested as if Harry and Sally were proving grounds for Cosmopolitan, until finally, tired of fighting, they admit that they do love one another after all.
The movie was written by Nora Ephron, and could be a prequel to her novel and screenplay “Heartburn,” which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in the story of a marriage and divorce. But this marriage seems headed for happier times, maybe because most of the big fights are out of the way before love is even declared.
Harry is played by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan is Sally, and they make a good movie couple because both actors are able to suggest genuine warmth and tenderness. This isn’t a romance of passion, although passion is present, but one that becomes possible only because the two people have grown up together, have matured until they can finally see clearly what they really want in a partner.
Ephron’s dialogue represents the way people would like to be able to talk. It’s witty and epigrammatic, and there are lots of lines to quote when you’re telling friends about the movie. The dialogue would defeat many actors, but Crystal and Ryan help it to work; their characters seem smart and quick enough to almost be this witty. It’s only occasionally that the humor is paid for at the expense of credibility – as in a hilarious but unconvincing scene where Sally sits in a crowded restaurant and demonstrates how to fake an orgasm. I laughed, but somehow I didn’t think Sally, or any woman, would really do that.
“When Harry Met Sally…” was directed by Rob Reiner, the onetime Meathead of “All in the Family,” whose credits now qualify him as one of Hollywood’s very best directors of comedy. Reiner’s films include “The Sure Thing,” “Stand by Me,” “This Is Spinal Tap!” and “The Princess Bride.” Each film is completely different from the others, and each one is successful on its own terms.
This film is probably his most conventional, in terms of structure and the way it fulfills our expectations. But what makes it special, apart from the Ephron screenplay, is the chemistry between Crystal and Ryan.
She is an open-faced, bright-eyed blond; he’s a gentle, skinny man with a lot of smart one-liners. What they both have (to repeat) is warmth.
Crystal demonstrated that quality in his previous film, the underrated “Memories Of Me,” and it’s here again this time, in scenes when he visibly softens when he sees that he has hurt her. He is one of the rare actors who can make an apology on the screen, and convince us he means it.
Ryan (from “Innerspace,” “The Presidio” and “D.O.A.”) has a difficult assignment – she spends most of the movie convincing Harry, and herself, that there’s nothing between them – and she has to let us see that there is something, after all.
Harry and Sally are aided, and sometimes hindered, in their romance by the efforts of their best friends (Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby), who meet on a blind date arranged by Harry and Sally, to provide a possible partner for Sally and Harry. They’re the kind of people who don’t make it hard for themselves, who realize they like each other, and accept that fact, and act on it.
Harry and Sally are tougher customers. They fight happiness every step of the way, until it finally wears them down. Roger Ebert, 1989.
CASABLANCA (1943)
If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that “Casablanca” is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.
No one making “Casablanca” thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an “A list” picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of “Casablanca” was largely the result of happy chance.
The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.
Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In “Casablanca,” he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.
The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. “What is your nationality?” the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, “I'm a drunkard.” His personal code: “I stick my neck out for nobody.”
Then “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him--left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.
All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar's piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, “As Time Goes By.” He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (“I thought I told you never to play that song!”). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don't yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)
The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (“Round up the usual suspects.”)
What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, “If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.”
From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the “happy” ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (“it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world”). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.
In her closeups during this scene, Bergman's face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.
Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as “Havana,” Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.
Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of “Casablanca” is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans. (ROGER EBERT).
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