Have You Seen ....... ? by David Thomson Part 6: The Big Sleep, Bood Simple and Casablanca

 

"It's about as much fun as anyone could have in 1946" says David Thomson. For me, it was just a succession of clever one liners. The whole plot is in Wikipedia. It is fairly convoluted so you have to concentrate as the death toll mounts up. The black and white print that was shown on TV was of exceptional quality, the lighting and the photography were excellent. 

I watched it again in March 2025. The dialogue is so sharp and fast that there was little I remembered from the convoluted plot. All that repartee, some very good, some poor. I liked the exteriors scenes with all the old cars. What I didn't remember was the scene in the Acme Book Shop where the owner is played by the brilliant Dorothy Malone. "She steals the show" and  "the dreamiest bookstore employee in history", although she actually owns it. See the scene on YouTube. She also won a best supporting actress Oscar for Written on the Wind in 1956.  

I cannot understand why the Coen Brothers first major movie did not make it to Thomson's 1,000 films. I know it only had a tiny budget, but Francis McDormand is quite something.  The neo-noir crime format became a Coen hallmark in their highly successful careers. Their writing obviously improves over the years but this stands up as an entertaining thriller. All to the sound of the ceiling fan. The shape of things to come.

Originally an unproduced stage play, a long period of development included many writers and a change of title. Michael Curtiz as director, along with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as the stars, put their souls into this spectacular drama. I cannot remember ever seeing this film before and I was surprised to find how much was played out in Rick's Cafe Americain. So it could easily have been a play. The plot is fairly straightforward, and so much is familiar from the famous excerpts that we see on TV. The writing is first class, lots of great one liners for which Bogart was famous. We get a tiny back story for when Bogart and Bergman first met in Paris. Their relationship is obviously central to the story. All with a clever ending. David Thomson sums it up as "maybe America's greatest moment".