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"Here's Looking At You, Kid" - Warner Bros Plan Casablanca Sequel


Ingrid Bergman Humphrey Bogart Howard Koch

Warner Bros are reported to be working on a sequel to one of Hollywood’s best loved classics: Casablanca. The original, iconic movie was released in 1942 and starred Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. Set in World War II, it told the tale of a man forced to choose between his love for a woman, or helping her husband escape Casablanca, to continue his fight against the Nazis.

The rumor currently doing the rounds is that Warner Bros are working on the next stage in the tale, with a working title of either Return to Casablanca or As Time Goes By. The plot is said to revolve around Richard Blaine (the illegitimate son of Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa Lund). At the end of the original movie, those two were famously separated and the new movie finds Rick on the hunt for his biological father, to discover what became of him.

The new movie was the brainchild of Cass Warner, The Independent reports. The late Howard Koch wrote the guidelines for a sequel back in the 1980s. Cass Warner, the granddaughter of the Warner Bros founder Harry Warner, has seemingly been pressing for the sequel to be made. Cass said, of the new movie “There will be flashbacks, but it's a film about the next generation; a son going back to find what happened to his parents. I wouldn't want to touch the original for the world,” though that may be of little reassurance to film purists.

As Time Goes By: Casablanca Piano To Be Sold At Auction


Humphrey Bogart Ingrid Bergman

During the 1940s, for many soldiers and civilians alike, the movie theatre was the best form of escapism from the abject poverty the war had thrust upon Europe, as well as the heartbreak and tragedy that fell across the continent like rain. Casablanca, a romantic feature starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, was one of the favourites during that era and in that respect it comes as no surprise that the piano which appeared in the film has been valued at over £1m, reports the BBC.

The iconic piano, which appears in during the most romantic scene of the film in which Sam sings 'As Time Goes By', is to be sold at Sothebys in December. The last time it was sold it fetched $154,000 and was bought by a Japanese collector. That was back in 1988 though, and in the last 24 years the price has been hiked up a bit. The sentimental value attributed to the film and therefore to objects that appear in it clearly have had an enormous effect.

The scene in which it appears has been parodied by the 1978 movie The Cheap Detective and even The Muppets alongside others, and we all know mimicry is the greatest form of flattery. Casablanca's success is unfailing and has been voted one of the best films of all time, and similarly 'As Time Goes By' has also been voted one of the best songs of the 20th century. The sale marks the 70th anniversary of the film, and despite time going by, evidently this doesn't stop the popularity of Casablanca, or its piano.

Anastasia (1956) Review


OK
This is the earlier, and definitely not animated, version of the story of the hunt for Anastasia Romanov, daughter of the Tsar who, according to legend, was the only member of the royal family to survive their massacre by revolutionaries in 1917. Anastasia starts off in the late 1920s among the exiled White Russian community in Paris, who rather obsessively keep their country's customs alive in a foreign place. Certain entrepreneurs in the community, including a disgraced former general, Prince Bounine (Yul Brynner), have been trying for years to discover a trainable woman with a close-enough resemblance to Anastasia that she could pass for the real thing - and collect 10 million pounds of Russian royal money sitting in a London bank. Bounine and his compatriots recruit the homeless and rather insane Ingrid Bergman for the task and start about molding her to pass muster before the exiles who knew the real Anastasia and who will, hopefully, sign testimonies to her identity. The twist is that Bergman at times actually thinks she is Anastasia.

There would have been plenty of opportunity for some My Fair Lady-type hijinks in the early part of this remarkably-controlled film, with Brynner playing the stern taskmaster and Bergman the not-so-ugly duckling about to transform into a swan. But director Anatole Litvak keeps everything measured and reasonably serious, focusing more on Bergman's dementia than the perfunctory romance that supposedly blossoms between her and Brynner. Bergman's performance (which won her an Oscar) has its hammy "look at me!" moments, but they're shrewdly undercut by the surrounding characters' suspicion that she is inventing not just her past as Anastasia but her entire dementia as well.

Continue reading: Anastasia (1956) Review

Spellbound (1945) Review


Very Good
Spellbound lands as one of Hitchcock's classics but it's far from his best work.

The entire plot is one of Hitch's more absurd (adapted from the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes). Back in 1945, the idea of psychoanalysis was just coming ito its own. Freud's ideas had really taken off, and wouldn't you know it, the time was right to make a movie based on the notion.

Continue reading: Spellbound (1945) Review

Ingrid Bergman

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