Remember Casablanca; Finnegan Wakes Up
This week: a conversation about Casablanca with Leslie Epstein (whose father and uncle wrote the film) and A.S. Hamrah. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
Umberto Eco noted that Casablanca is more than just a single movie—“it is movies.” The critic A. S. Hamrah joined us this week to talk about the 1942 film, and said the point of Eco’s line is that
it’s like the perfect Platonic ideal of a Hollywood movie from that period . . . You know, it’s the way the narrative is constructed, the heroism of Bogart, the character actors, the swift motion of the story through the film, the beautiful photography in black and white, the production design, which is all done on the backlot and at Van Nuys Airport, you know, in studio-created fog at the end of the film.
The occasion of this conversation was, in part, the recent Oscar nominations led by Mank, a film about 1940s Hollywood, and also the publication of Leslie Epstein’s novel Hill of Beans, which traces the WWII drama behind Casablanca. Here’s Sean Burns, writing for WBUR’s ARTery:
This is a gleefully irreverent book, presenting Old Hollywood as a parade of pushovers and oversexed goons with unchecked libidos and uncomfortably undue influence on political figures. It’s familiar family territory for Epstein, whose father Philip and uncle Julius co-wrote “Casablanca” and contributed quips to dozens of other classics including “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Arsenic and Old Lace.” The Epstein twins pop up briefly here and there throughout the book to annoy the main character, Warner Bros. vice president of production Jack L. Warner, an astoundingly vulgar and vindictive man doing his darndest to make sure the Allied invasion of North Africa is timed to promote his latest prestige picture.
Epstein, who’s taught fiction at Boston University for decades, gives us a novelist’s view of the place, the mood, and the social dynamics behind Hollywood’s great achievement. The Hollywood of the 1940s nurtured a particular kind of writing, especially that of Epstein’s father and uncle, those identical twins Philip and Julius. Leslie Epstein describes their process on this week’s show:
They thought of the lines absolutely identically. I don’t know if you were there, but when we did the Coolidge Corner Theater fiftieth anniversary retrospective and someone asked Julie, whose line is what, he said, “I honestly don’t know.” And I remember as a kid sitting outside the library where they would be working on a later film and I would hear through the closed door of the library, one of them would go yadadity yadity yadity and the other would go yadadity yadity yadity and they would burst out in laughter. And that’s when I thought to myself, this writing game sounds pretty good to me and you can sleep until 12, play a little tennis and then write for two hours and make a living.
Hamrah, author of The Earth Dies Streaming, has his own intimate acquaintance with Casablanca:
I was a projectionist at the Brattle in Harvard Square in the 1990s, for about seven years, and I projected Casablanca a lot of times, because twice a year they would show Casablanca for a week during reading week at Harvard—as well as other Humphrey Bogart films. And you know, the cult of Casablanca starts both in France and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after Bogart’s death, at the Brattle, which was also owned by the Janus Theater people, which is now Criterion. You know, Casablanca, in a way, is the first cult film. It’s a film that kind of transcended Hollywood by being the ultimate product of Hollywood at the same time. It’s a film that is purely a product of the studio system but doesn’t seem compromised at all.
Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca, emigre from Hungary, is not considered an auteur to the same extent that other directors at Warner Brothers at the time were, like Raoul Walsh or Howard Hawks who made The Big Sleep. And so his participation as an artist is different than theirs, it’s perceived now. It’s often used as an example of an anti-auteurist film that came together despite not having a presiding artistic presence. Not that Curtiz wasn’t an artist, just that his personality doesn’t impose itself as much on the films that he makes as other directors do. And, you know, in this case, it serves a script that Leslie’s father and uncle wrote so well.
Listen: Finnegan and Friends
Our producer Adam Colman has a new LitHub podcast miniseries that seeks to make sense of the world’s most baffling book: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The show, Finnegan and Friends, untangles cosmic conundra along with Joyce’s novel. You don’t need to read the Wake to travel into the mystery of things with this show, though; just tune in wherever you go for podcasts!
With a range of guests — including a novelist [Joshua Cohen], an actor [Olwen Fouéré], a sleep specialist [Dr. Jade Wu], a philosopher [Philip Kitcher], and several Joyce scholars [including Joseph Nugent, Katherine O’Callaghan] — Finnegan and Friends follows tangents inspired by Joyce’s novel of dreamy strangeness. We discover, along the way, that the Wake’s infinite complexity comes from attention to our most simple, elemental experiences (of dreams, of water, of local and familiar language).
Show some support for a brave little podcast attempting the impossible: listen to Finnegan and Friends (here’s the Apple Podcasts link) and be sure to rate it!
Listen: Trickster
ROS alum Frank Horton has a podcast out, too, about Carlos Castaneda; it’s called Trickster. You might know the basics about Castaneda, but the question remains: who was he, really?
A man who’s been called so many things: a groundbreaking anthropologist, a poetic genius, a millionaire playboy, an enlightened guru, a shameless hoaxer. An event that took place out among the sand dunes of Death Valley may provide some answers. It was there, in late February of 2003, that two backpackers made a shocking discovery: human bones half buried in the sand.
Listen where fine podcasts are found (here’s the Apple link), and support the audio arts!
Read: The Biography
The book chatter this week is about Blake Bailey’s biography of Phillip Roth. Chris interviewed Bailey last week, and we’ll be reprising our own interview with Roth from 2006.
This week’s ephemeral library
Get psyched for Finnegan and Friends by reading Michael Chabon’s NYRB essay on the Wake. Go to the movies with Richard Brody. Elizabeth Loftus on the meaning of memory. Read Murakami’s writing advice. The Making of Sgt Pepper.
See you next week folks.
The OS Movie Club.
