Sultry Valentine’s Day

Family Movie Night 

By Karyn Bowman

 

Image from IMDb.com

Every year, when it gets close to Valentine’s Day I always suggest renting Return to Me. The movie stars David Duchovny and Minnie Driver as two Chicagoans who meet by chance but have a deeper connection than either is aware.

 

It would complicated to explain but let’s just say it involves a heart transplant and a terrible car accident. The movie was written and directed by Bonnie Hunt who used to be a nurse.

 

I like the performances by the cast and the sincerity of the script. I know the places where the movie was filmed and love that people get messy. Life is never neat and clean which sometimes needs to be reflected in the movies.

 

It is a very sweet love story. And that is fine most of the time. However, sometimes, we need something a little sultry. We want to live on the edge just a little bit.

 

Maybe not as crazy as Something Wild starring Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels in which the yuppie’s life is taken over by the wild woman. It is all fun and games until her ex-husband, who is a bit crazy, returns.

 

No, I am thinking sultry as in Lauren Bacall. Is she a good girl or a bad girl or is it simply hard to tell. She drinks hard, lives hard, and has her own sense of right and wrong. Throughout it all she is beautiful in a mysterious sort of way.

 

Some of you might be asking who is Lauren Bacall. Some might remember her as the mother in the Barbara Streisand movie, The Mirror Has Two Faces. But those of us with longer memories have seen her paired up with her first husband, Humphrey Bogart. She and Bogey were a part of the Rat Pack in the beginning. They lived the glamorous life in a Hollywood that is far different from today.

 

Poster Image from IMDb.com

Recently, some tv show featured a clip in which a beautiful woman flirted with a man by asking him if he knew how to whistle. Her dark sultry voice lets him know she is there for the taking but he has to put in a little effort. He only had to whistle.

 

“You know how to do that, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

 

That line from To Have or Have Not stops most men in their tracks, especially when delivered by Bacall in her film debut looking like the beautiful model that she was at the time.

 

Her sultry presence was paired again with Bogart in The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo. Bogart and Bacall were a very popular movie couple with the movie-going public. While the story might focus of the darker side of life, these noir films also featured deep rich characters.

 

None of these are kids friendly in regards to context. Most kids simply do not have the patience to sit through these old movies. But for film buffs, it is a chance to relive movie-making in a period that seems to be so much more glamorous than the current time.

 

Until next week, see you in the rental aisle.

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I Remember Every Detail

Family Movie Night

 

By Karyn Bowman

 

“You played it for her, you can play it for me.”

 

That line and many others come from Casablanca which opened in theaters seventy years ago this week. The movie was released just a few weeks after the war opened on the African front, which explains the map sequence at the beginning of the 1942 film.

 

Poster Image from IMDb.com

If you have never seen the movie, the story is this: A man runs a tavern and secret casino in Casablanca. Every day more refugees from Europe come to the French colonial city in Morocco hoping to get the necessary papers to leave the county, a stop away from America.

 

One night a famous resistance leader comes to the club looking for such papers for himself and his wife. But what the husband does not know is that his wife and the club owner have a past that occurred during the time everyone thought the leader was dead. The owner has papers everyone wants but the question is what will he do with them as the Germans are breathing down his neck.

 

It is a movie you can watch with your teens but be aware that there are no car chases or crash sequences. There are innuendos about sexual favors and two murders occur on-screen. Dialogue runs this movie and the great lines seem never-ending.

 

“This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

 

I always wonder if a creative person knows they are writing or working on perfection as they do it. The Epstein twins may not have thought they were doing that at the time. This was just another movie they were writing when the studios put out hundreds of movies a year.

 

There are great legends connected to this movie such as Ronald Reagan originally being cast as Rick. Personally, I do not think he had the right amount of dark disappointment to play the casino owner. Bogart, with his string of gangster roles, displayed a man who hid his heart with a layer of toughness.

 

Admit it, you guys. Once you have seen Bogart perform in just about any movie, you want to be as cool as all that. This role defines that elusive male who is tough but able to be so crazy in love that years later he is still angry at the woman who got away. And instead of taking that anger out on the world, every now and again he performs an act of kindness that allows young love to continue on to the new world.

 

This was Bogart’s first truly romantic role. He was given a partner who gave him everything back that he dished out. I am not sure if I ever saw Ingrid Bergman more beautiful, more glowing than in this movie. She is a woman who appears divided between two men of similar standards. She is willing to go to extremes to protect the man she loves but we are left guessing who that man is for the majority of the movie.

 

“Round up the usual suspects.”

 

Perhaps the best judge of any movie is whether or not you would watch it again. Some movies make me feel embarrassed that I ever liked them. When I watch Casablanca I want to be there in the hot and dry African city – going to the club every night, attending Resistance meetings, and looking as stylish as Elsa did in every scene.

 

Until next week, see you in the rental aisle.