From the March 11 Issue of the County Journal...
While I listening to a local broadcaster describe a poorly officiated basketball game the other night, I happened to come upon the AFI’s (American Film Institute) Best 100 Movies of All-Time.
After I got over the disappointment that Point Break or The Muppet Movie didn’t make the list, I noticed Casablanca, (the tale of a statistically impossible reunion of two lovers) was #2. Having seen it five or so times, I can say I like the movie (I think it is better than Citizen Kane, although I now understand why he went crazy) but it requires a certain amount of suspension of belief.
The premise that Ilsa would just happen to come by a bar (on another continent) run by Rick, who she was in love with in Paris right before she found out her husband hadn’t been murdered by the Nazis after all, is just silly. It’s too much of a coincidence that they would ever see each again.
I once lived in a town while an ex-girlfriend was there at the same time. The town had about six thousand people and you could drive across it in 15 minutes (as opposed to two continents) and I never saw her by accident on any ocassion, except one night in the gym when she was kissing another guy.
The guy was a short, skinny geek that hadn’t had a girlfriend before (not that I knew of) and here he was kissing my cheerleader girlfriend near where (the location in the gym) I used to sit on the bench for the basketball team.
But it wasn’t that he was kissing her that bothered me the most, although, as I recall, that was a large part of the problem.
No, the thing that bothered me most was that it occurred to me his type (skinny geek) was the kind of guy she liked…now, either I wasn’t geek enough, or...never mind.
Anyway, the idea that after all those years Ilsa would walk into Rick’s American Cafe was just a little out of my believable zone.
But, that’s why the story was made into a movie, I suppose.
Darrell Teubner, Editor
