Casablanca

[Derek C. Maus]

On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Paul Mackin wrote:

> Noticed in watching this WWII-era classic last evening how much talk there
> was in it of buying and selling and the monetary value put on human life.

Check out Orson Welles's character's comments in THE THIRD MAN (1949) if
you want to see another movie with a lot of GR overlap in that regard. I
always thought that there was something so very film noir (in the original
40s and 50s sense, not the 60s and 70s neo-noir revival sense) about the
whole book, but that point was really brought home to me when listening to
Harry Lime's speech about the comparative value of Florentine economic
tyrrany vs. 500 years of Swiss democracy (the sole product of value of
which is, in his words, "the cuckoo clock"). I guess Graham Greene gets
the credit for that riff, but it works so well coming out of the mouth
of...oh yeah, the Kenosha Kid. Hmmm...nah, I won't start that shit again.

The ghost of Joseph Cotten as Tyrone in the movie version perhaps? I bet
we can digitize him into the film by the time it gets made.

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Derek C. Maus               | "What am I opposed to tell my customers?"
dmaus at email.unc.edu         | Swearingen said. "'Sorry, Washington says
UNC-CH, Dept. of English    | no more fanny packs for you; time to spend
http://www.unc.edu/~dmaus/  | your money on great works of literature'?
                            | It doesn't work that way."   --THE ONION
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