Casablanca Usual Suspects Quotes

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

Movies today are bigger, brighter, technically dazzling, awesome in their computer generated special effects. But they are also thinner; they lack the thick layers of character actors who brought depth to the background and refracted the stars’ light, so that it formed a different and more complicated image.

Today, any movie that didn’t show Rick and Ilsa sweatily grappling with each other’s naked bodies in Rick’s apartment above the café would be considered old-fashioned. But graphic sex wipes out ambiguity, and the ambiguity in Casablanca, the uncertainty about events and motives, is one of the things that still entices us.

The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then - love lost for the good of the world - and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. No movie can last if it cannot find new things to say to new generations. Captain Renault, the one gray character in a black and white time, would’ve been amused.

It is a mistake to confuse old with golden, a word within which those letters are often trapped. But the old Hollywood studios did have a golden era, when art, and commerce, and hard work fitted comfortably together.

RENAULT I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me. RICK It was a combination of all three. RENAULT And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca? RICK My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. RENAULT Waters? What waters? We are in the desert. RICK I was misinformed.

By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie.

By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie. She wrote despairing letters to Ruth Roberts from Rochester, New York where her husband Petter Lindstrom, who had been a dentist in Sweden, was preparing to become a neurosurgeon. "I am so fed up with Rochester and Main Street I am ready to cry," she wrote.

The solitary chess game Rick is playing when the camera first focuses on him in Casablanca was a real game Bogart was playing by mail with Irving Kovner of Brooklyn. Bogart would play chess with anyone at any time, and, when he was making Casablanca he was also doing his patriotic duty by playing a number of mail games with sailors in the U.S. Navy. Whatever the quality of his game, Bogart loved chess. "I enjoy chess because there's no luck to it," he told Ezra Goodman.

It is possible that one of the seven other major studios might have bought and made a movie from Everybody comes to Rick's, an unproduced play about a cynical American who owns a bar in Casablanca. (One producer at M-G-M, Sam Marx, did want to buy the play for $5.000, but his boss didn't think it was worth the money.) It wouldn't have been the same movie, not only because it would have starred Gary Cooper at Paramount, Clark Gable at M-G-M, or Tyrone Power at Fox but because another studio's style would have been more languid, less sardonic, or opulently Technicolored.

But I can keep her sequestered in her room until the case is solved.” “Wonder how long that’ll take, Cy?” “I don’t know. Sometimes it takes years to solve a murder.” The two of us laughed, even though both of us knew that neither of us would be satisfied if the case dragged on. “Okay, Louie, it’s time to inconvenience the guests. Round up the usual suspects.” My partner laughed at my reference to the movie Casablanca, then turned toward the door. Our job wasn’t finished. It had barely begun.