Best Pictures... "Play it Again, Clint"

Nathaniel: Once again we apologize for the long delays between episodes. This Best Picture From the Outside In series… it’s a helluva thing.

1928----1943------------------------1992-----2007

We continue to pull one movie from either end of Oscar’s chronology, working towards the center of their eighty-plus year history. This match up brings us two of Oscar’s most respected prize-winners: Casablanca (1943) and Unforgiven (1992). Both films essentially begin with a sudden eruption of violence (a shooting and a slashing, respectively) followed by the intervention of local law enforcement (embodied by Claude Rains and Gene Hackman, respectively). World War II era Morocco and Wild West era Wyoming are dangerous and morally ambiguous places. They're also fine places to escape from one's past and start anew. At least that's how Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and William Munny (Clint Eastwood) see it.

Casablanca and Unforgiven toss out key plot points and introduce multiple supporting players before they get to Bogie and Clint, their twin heavyweight champions of American masculinity. It’s almost as if the stories have to spin madly from the start to create enough centripetal force to yank these two self-contained icons away from their isolation and pull them into the action.

I appreciate Clint's deconstruction of his own mythology through William Munny in Unforgiven but in the end I think he can't get enough distance from it. He is that He is as it were. Casablanca, on the other hand, benefits enormously from the distance that its director Michael Curtiz has while he gazes at his star. Rick's reluctance to star in his own movie, Casablanca, remains wonderfully fascinating. What's more I love the incongruous artistic friction between Rick's job as host of the party (Everybody Goes to Rick's was the original title of the movie) and his actual personality as displayed throughout the movie (bitter, unknowable and more than a little self-pitying) which never seem to jibe. Casablanca remains unbeatably gripping, especially once Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) has entered the film. The western is trickier to ride with as it run in circles and occassionally veers toward great scenes. I love Unforgiven's thematic gravitas but I always feel like it's a sell out in the end, backing away from its disturbingly sober guilt to engage in old fashioned consequence-free blood spilling.

But I'm jumping too far ahead. Back to the beginning... when did you know that you loved these movies? Or if you didn't love them (gasp), where did they lose you?

Mike: Unforgiven had me with its opening crawl, about a mother's dismay that her only daughter would marry "a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition," rolling over a lonely shot, mostly silhouettes, of a man burying his wife. There's that distance you mentioned, and it crops up again and again throughout the film in super-wide establishing shots and full-body long shots. It's also there in the self-consciously artificial eloquence of the crawl and of much of the dialog; later, Little Bill will ridicule the writing of Saul Rubinek's scribe (a mirror, perhaps, of piano-playing Sam in Casablanca?), but he doesn't notice that he tends to talk like he's in a penny dreadful.

Casablanca also had me from its opening, with the staccato narration about how people come to Casablanca "to wait... and wait... and wait," followed by that amazing shot of one of the usual suspects shot to death against a huge poster of Marshal Petain, and then the amusing interlude with the pickpocket advising some unsuspecting victims to beware of people exactly like him. It's that combination of dead-serious drama, somewhat overwrought melodrama, and diverting comedy that makes the film for me: it has all the elements of a typical Hollywood production, but it all comes together in a magical, perfect film.


Nick: At no point have I known that I loved Unforgiven, though I admire parts of it very much and think it's an exceedingly handsome film much of the time. And "thematic gravitas" pretty much hits the nail on its big cardinal virtue, give or take the way in which the framings and shot sequences often do look beneath the brooding 90s cinematography as though the movie were made four decades earlier, like Sam Fuller or somebody making a nasty double-biller for The Searchers. (You can certainly imagine Fuller opening a movie with this ghastly, misogynist violence, though his approach would have been even less timid.)

But I'm going to disproportionately focus on my misgivings, because the film's reputation always strikes me as excessive to its strengths. I agree with Nathaniel that Clint never manages enough distance from his own iconicity, partly because his acting feels so inadequate to the task. I rarely feel, despite the curdled force of the filmmaking in William Munny's two encounters with Gene Hackman's Bill Daggett, that this character has really transcended a past life of odious heartlessness, or that he's been pulled fully back in, or that it was all that difficult for him to get pulled back in, if that's what's happened. For sure the film's essay about corrosive violence works, but I just don't buy the arc it's supposed to have. At times, Eastwood's line readings border on the disastrous, but even when he's solid, he's often a mouthpiece for the film's assertions about William Munny while actually embodying someone too much like Clint Eastwood, and blurrily so: waffling between the aloofness of his most famous characterizations and the grotty naturalism that the script seems to require.

On that point, I've gotta add that, Hackman's Oscar notwithstanding, the unevenness of the film's other performances - a chronic problem in better and worse Eastwood pictures - limits the power of this one. And as marvelously as the film resuscitates a late 40s / mid 50s shooting and editing style, I often feel (as I do not in Million Dollar Baby) that the film sticks itself with unnecessary shots and some repetitive scenes, especially as Eastwood, Freeman, and Woolvert make their way to Big Whiskey. A lot of people lionize the "classical" filmmaking as though it's automatically tremendously succinct and disciplined, or vindicated in every respect by relations to past masters, and I just don't think it always is.

Mike: Just nudging back in: I think the film's uncertainty about whether Munny's transcended his past life of odious heartlessness is the point, and Munny shares that uncertainty; his constant "I've changed! I've changed! I'm not like that!" is a bit of a Munny doth protest too much. He's trying to convince himself and everyone around him, but I never really buy it: he's always full of fear of himself; he knows what kind of person he is, even if he doesn't want to be that person. He knows that all it will take is a little too much to drink or an encounter with someone who doesn't believe his protestations to let everything loose again. He's like a guy who joined a monastery disguised as a pig farm to hide from his addiction to chaos, and his incessant talk about dear departed Claudia is like a repetitive recitation of the rosary. I think that's why the super-Munny who emerges during the shootout at the end didn't throw me very much, because I saw that underneath the surface the whole time.

Humble Pig Farmer or No Good Killer?

Nick: Whereas I believe Eastwood's projection of what Munny "really is" only marginally more than his borderline-amateurish performance as Munny the pig farmer (which is too clumsy to me to work as a reflection of Munny's own ill-suitedness to that task). Beyond a few choice shots and moments, I don't feel the odious heartlessness, the addiction to chaos, the super-Munny, or the desperate self-convincing. I absolutely agree with you that the script works exactly as you say, but what all the moody sepia underlighting in the world and all the stark silhouettes against a tub-colored sky can't do (for me), and what Eastwood's acting wholly fails to do, is to put real conviction and emotional plausibility into the admirably ambitious, tragic pitch of these character beats. I actually buy Frankie's soul sickness and sour temper in Million Dollar Baby much more than what's going on with Munny... and speaking of protesting too much, I worry that in stacking so many chips in the square of Munny As Tragic Figure and Story As Morality Parable, the film almost totally misses the more immediate premise, swatted right in the character's name, that he's doing all this because he flat needs the cash.

Break the tie, Nathaniel!

Nathaniel: Unnhhh....I realize you're pushing your reservations to the forefront rather than focusing on what you do love about it, just for conversation's sake. But if I'm breaking a tie it doesn't come down in the movie's favor. BUT I mostly like the movie I should quickly add, for fear that it's über fans come at me with guns a blazin.

I love Mike's assertion that the monster is always still lurking and the man doth protest too much but I hadn't realized until reading your objections Nick, that what was missing for me was that kind of spine-tingling amorality/savagery that suddenly makes you uncomfortable with your pre-existing love for the iconic star you've come to see: I'm thinking of a couple of Daniel Day-Lewis moments in There Will be Blood or that beating scene in Bugsy where the otherwise charming and suave Warren Beatty suddenly seems considerably less human while shouting at a victim with blood streaming down his face. (Remember that?)

I also think the bookend scrawls spoil it. That is so hedging your bets. Especially with the sunset. It's as if Unforgiven knows that deep down it is a super impressively disturbing movie but it doesn't want to offend anyone who might need more in the way of catharsis and redemption or don't want to worry so much about how much they enjoy watching Clint Eastwood kill people. I guess I wanted more in the performance and in the movie that was tough to stomach. No pun intended but I'm thinking of the scene where the guy gets shot in his. You just have to deal with his howling and his bleeding and his terror about dying while everyone else in the scene is reduced to the uncomfortable act of seeing and hearing him expire. Great stuff.

Nick: The toughest thing for me to stomach in the movie is the scene where Eastwood, still a stranger in Big Whiskey, is so pitifully hunched under his hat in the bar, and Hackman is goading him for his firearms and fixing to show him some Daggett-style justice. There's something bracing about the scene's stress on Daggett's absolutism and about the way the shots, the edits, and Eastwood's body evoke how coiled up, angry, ambivalent, and outmatched Munny is in this moment. I wish the opening assault on Delilah resonated quite this much, or Ned's apprehension and murder, but the sloppy casting and directing of the women keeps slaking the force of the outraged-women plotline. Frankly, I worry that the film can't think or feel its way all the way these crimes; it uses them too much as plot devices that get a little overwhelmed by the thick, heavy atmosphere, and it verges on a cynical use of victimized women and a somewhat timidly coded lynching as another one of those crutches on which rests the re-emergence of Eastwood the Avenger that worries Nathaniel at the end.

I'm totally leaving it up to you to trust that I like this film much more than I'm admitting, but I find its flaws almost as galling as its almost instant canonization. I'll happily concede that the
acerbic challenges to Western mythology in the Hackman/Rubinek scenes almost works better for me than some of the foreground Will Munny stuff, and it's a much more engrossing second-tier storyline than I had remembered.

Whereas the 'second-tier' stuff in Casablanca is not only perfectly matched to the headlining relationship between Rick and Ilsa, but I can barely find a single thing in the movie that isn't enriched by its connections to everything else in the movie.

Nathaniel: Absolutely. I suffer forgetfulness when it comes to Casablanca, which turns out to be a blessing in disguise; every time I've seen the movie it's like my first screening of it. The thing that struck me most this time was, in fact, the secondary elements and how they reflect back on and complicate the main triangle of Rick, Ilsa and Victor. Like the young couple I had completely forgotten about, the impoverished Bulgarians.

Should the Mrs. sleep with Renault (Claude Rains) to get exit visas and hide it from the Mr. forever? Posing this indelicate question to Rick, he is brusque and judgmental 'Go back to Bulgaria'.

Nick: He is incredibly peremptory, occasionally even cruel, for a protagonist we are obviously meant to admire. And it’s not as though Bogie is downplaying Rick’s unpleasant qualities, which is impressive in and of itself. But you were saying…

Nathaniel: ...that just as soon as he's bolted from all that projected sexual guilt and marital protectiveness, he's confronted with Ilsa and Rick, reentering his club. He rudely reminds Ilsa of her own hidden indiscretions with a reference to Paris and then he's bolting out of there too and back to the Bulgarians to do what amounts to a good dead. And then he's off again, (this movie is as restless as Rick himself) this time colliding with Renault, the villain in this particular scenario. But, that's so murky, because the movie is continually asking us to equate Rick with Renault (in spirit if not in temperament) each of them reigning over their own amoral fiefdoms.

Now, the situations and the characters are not at all perfect mirrors of one another (which is how clumsier movies often aim for this same effect) but we're still talking about a man of questionable motives confronted with a sexual triangle that casts a possibly harsh light on his own feelings in the other sexual triangle in which a woman has been unfaithful to a husband that she shields as much as she can.

Nick: Totally. And I especially agree that the recurrent doubling of Rick and Renault—which might be a “beautiful friendship,” but it’s also a pretty unnerving conflation from the audience’s point of view—is the linchpin to all of the other complex and often queasy analogies that the film suggests along the way among its characters, and their endless, tough predicaments. Even with the Lorre and Greenstreet characters, you can see little glimmers of them in Rick. If anything, he comes across as sharing Greenstreet’s curdled pragmatism at least as much as Laszlo’s idealism, and even Laszlo is weirdly icy. It’s hard to match the Henreid performance with the superlatives we keep hearing about him, even though this isn’t the kind of film that goes for the blunt irony of the notorious hero who’s actually just a cold fish, or an asshole. He’s something idiosyncratic, remote, believably hard to label. Which only gets back to how amazing it is that Casablanca trusts its audience not just to parse out all of this plot but to accept the gradations of character and compromise at almost every turn.

a beautiful friendship? or something more troubling...

Nathaniel: It's interesting to me that the movie is so widely considered one of our most romantic because in some ways it's very dry eyed about the impracticality and selfishness of passionate love. This despite all those wet eyed closeups.

Nick: Nathaniel, if you keep saying all this smart stuff, I’m not going to have anything to add except, “I know! I agree!” and Mike is going to keep being stultified into not saying anything. Stop being so quick and savvy!

I do actually think that the weird mismatch between Casablanca’s immortal commemoration as this fabulous love story and the actual experience of the movie, which involves so much ethical trade-off and compromise and emotions that are completely dictated or at least regulated by immediate circumstances… this is getting to be an overly long sentence, but don’t you think that’s part of why the movie is so hard to remember, from viewing to viewing? There’s too much cultural weight accrued to the movie people probably want Casablanca to be (the paean to a love that conquers all, and agrees to sacrifice itself for the Greater Good), that I find it hard, too, to remember all the complexity and ambivalence in the Rick-Ilsa relationship, and how peripheral it often is to so much else in the movie. It’s like, the movie is just as “on” when all the denizens of the café are duking it out with their different national anthems. And when Greenstreet or Lorre or Conrad Veidt or exceptional, marvelous, droll, and flawless Claude Rains is on the screen, there is no indication that the movie is treating them as anything less than a lead character, or principal antagonist. There’s just so much going on! Even Sam is more of a character, with a real and rounded point of view, than the backgrounded songsmith that we inevitably expect in a Hollywood film of this epoch.

Which leaves me wondering, is Casablanca so phenomenally great, and such a universally loved classic, because a) it’s able to balance a love story with so many other elements of other narratives and genres, or because b) people implicitly realize that however much we want stories about love’s simplicity and perfection, we actually need stories about the difficulties and quandaries of love, and its failure to rise up above everything else in our lives, much less to conquer it, or because c) given all the cynicism and political nervousness in Casablanca, it’s a major miracle that the love story does resonate so powerfully, and that Bogie and Bergman have such phenomenal chemistry that even though their only scenes of full, sublime connection are far, far away in a flashback, the movie is able to make that feeling available to us, in no more than a few minutes of a jam-packed film?

You can play it again... and again

Mike: I've been pondering this for a month. Honestly! How do I follow that exchange? By changing the subject.

I share Nathaniel's forgetfulness, as this feels like a new movie every time I see it. Which ties into my lame attempt to wrap this up: this time around I was paying attention to memories and their power over Rick, and that applies to Will Munny as well. "You must remember this" but neither wants to remember. Rick ran to Casablanca and his bar to escape his broken heart and his reputation as a freedom fighter, but the events of the film reveal that Rick's still as much of a bleeding heart as he ever was. Will Munny ran to a pig farm and the arms of an honest woman to escape his reputation as a cold-blooded killer, but (at least I argued) he can't escape the fact that his reputation is basically accurate. Just like you can't change the fact that the "Best Pictures from the Outside In" series is going to be plagued by long delays between installments, neither man can change his essential nature. It's an interesting pairing, especially coming after Schindler's List which presents its own mirror images, one guy who can't change what he is and another who manages to. Life and fate, predestination—I hope that's a big enough note to exit on.

Casablanca was nominated for 8 Oscars and won 3 (Picture, Director and Screenplay) but not for the acting which we raved so much about. Unforgiven was nominated for 9 and won 4 (Picture, Director, Supporting Actor for Gene Hackman and Editing) but not for the screenplay that we raved so much about.

all 16 episodes of "Best Pictures..."
A joint creation/production from Goatdog's Movies, Nick's Flick Picks and The Film Experience

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