Royce's Random Thoughts

Just an excerpt from an Elseworlds story I've had bouncing in my for a couple of years, set during WWII, as an answer to a really terribly racist Batman serial that Columbia Pictures released in 1943.

( Cut for period appropriate racism )

Summary: Rick, owner of a cafe popular with European refugees in Vichy controlled Casablanca, finds his carefully maintained neutrality and cynicism tested when the love of his life abruptly returns, seeking his help for herself...

...and her husband.

Review: First, a shameful admission. I'm going to be 44 years old next Saturday and I've never seen this movie in its entirety. I knew all the great lines, from "Of all the gin joints in the world..." to "I came for the waters..." to "Round up the usual suspects" of course, but I'd never actually taken the time to watch the film, becoming more reluctant to do so when I got older, mostly because I figured the actual product couldn't match up to the legend.

Ahem. I stand corrected.

I think up until the release of The Princess Bride, this is probably the most quotable movie ever made. Which is nothing short of amazing given the second half of the movie was written on the fly, script changes coming in daily as the writers realized even they didn't know which man Ilsa would end up with, and the executives at Warner Bros. increasingly beginning to panic. And like TPB, it's not so much a single movie as a mashup of different genres that come together like some tasty jambalaya. It's a war movie with no Allied soldiers, a spy thriller with no secret agents, a cop movie where the chief is on the take (and we love him for it), a comedy where the stakes are deadly, and a romance movie where the leading man doesn't get the girl. It all shouldn't work, but somehow it wonderfully does, as Humphrey Bogart plays a cynic with his heart on his sleeve, Ingrid Bergman a woman torn between two men she loves with equal passion, and Claude Raines' Louis is massively corrupt even as he plays his German masters like a violin that might explode in his hands.

A deserved classic, and forever recommended.

Torah! Torah! Torah! (1970) The heartrending story of three Hawaiian Hasidic Hebrew boys whose talmudic studies are interrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We follow the Jaunty Jews as they form their own kosher unit of the Marines and battle their way from island to island (but never on Shabat!) on their way to a showdown over Tokyo Bay, where … wait a minute. That was a typo up there. Sorry. Let’s start over …

-John Varley, in a review of Tora! Tora! Tora!, which has a slightly different plot...

Note: I'm slightly weirded out that james_nicoll watches this as a Christmas movie. But then again I always watch Gettysburg every 4th of July.