CASABLANCA AND OTHER CLASSICS

Just a few months ago I considered myself an avant garde connoisseur of movies. I liked to think that I distinguished myself through my taste in movies( read Kurosawa, Ray...etc) but my pretensions were quickly dissipated by a chance encounter with an entirely new genre of movies- the early classics.

What happened is this in a nutshell. A very bored chap, nothing to do but surf the internet, an idea strikes him, why not look for a list of some great movies, and Voila! what else but 'Casablanca' appears like the proverbial mother lode!

At first I was a little disinterested; I did not give enough credit to the movie making abilities of those old chaps. But I watched it anyway and boy! did I dig it! Those people knew how to entertain for sure, but what was more fascinating was the entire stylistic and thematic treatment of the movie.

The legendary Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman played the lead with a very convincing supporting role being eschewed by Paul Henreid. And how can one forget the delightful Tom Foolery of Dooley Wilson as Sam, the confidant and accomplice of the lead hero Rick. One gets the feeling that a lot of thinking went into the assemblage of the entire cast, and testifying to it's success is the incredible way in which everything comes together! At the end I was as equally enamored with the characters as with the plot and the era itself. I always hate to be the spoil sport so beyond this I'll not give anything away.

My encounter with the classics hardly stops there. I went on to watch classic westerns like 'The red river', 'High plains drifter' starring the inimitable and Macho Clint Eastwood, 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' and others. But the one I enjoyed the most definitely was 'High Noon' starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly: the mastery of the director Fred Zinnemann is something to be savored rather than described. I'll just second what one critic says about the movie- not a single frame is wasted!

After watching all these great movies I now realize that the movies are one field where people with pretensions of refinement and snootiness, like I was and still am but to a lesser degree, do not belong. They just cannot enjoy movies at all because they are constantly measuring one against the other. The truth is that it is an entire panaroma of sights, sounds and ideas that has to be viewed from different vantage points to be properly grasped. The primary intent of movies after all was, is, and will always be to entertain.