In the race to finish We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie, film historian Noah Isenberg hit his writing stride during the summer of 2015.
While living in Norwich and serving as a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College’s Leslie Center for the Humanities, Isenberg found particular inspiration in the role of actors, writers and crew who had fled the tide of Nazism and fascism that swamped Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s, or descendants of immigrants who were worrying about family stuck in Europe.
“At that point I had no idea of the world into which the book would be released,” the 49-year-old Isenberg recalled during a telephone interview on Wednesday. “It became more apparent during the anti-refugee rhetoric of the presidential campaign last year. And now with the proposed travel ban” on refugees from several Muslim-majority countries “it’s amazing how powerfully it resonates in our current climate, with refugees from war-torn Syria and elsewhere.
“That’s pretty much all people want to talk about when I take the book to readings.”
Next stop in Isenberg’s tour with the book, which W.W. Norton and Co. released on Feb. 14, is a reading at the Norwich Bookstore on Thursday night, a short walk from the house where he and his wife are spending a fifth summer.
Isenberg, who is director of screen studies and a professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City, first noticed the role that refugees played in the movie industry while researching Edgar D. Ulmer: A Filmmaker on the Margins, about a prolific director-writer who had left the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I and tried in vain to return to his native Vienna just as Germany was taking over Austria.
“There was such a diversity and range of talent of these emigre actors and writers and technical people,” Isenberg said. “They were very much a part of the brain trust of the business.”
As the making of Casablanca went along, Isenberg added, many of the scenes infused the picture with meaning, depicting many stateless characters who were scrambling to find their way from Nazi-occupied Morocco.
“Many of them had experienced various strands of the narrative,” he said. “People often ask me why the film retains its immediacy. That’s a big part of it that gets overlooked with the romance between Bogart and Bergman. These other people are the ones who give it the texture, the authenticity.”
As Casablanca approaches the 75th anniversary of its release in November, Isenberg welcomes the chance to view all or parts of it anew, either at readings (where space allows a projector and a screen) or at festivals such as one he recently attended at the Red River Theaters in Concord.
“I’m deep into triple digits,” he said of the number of viewings since his first, as an unimpressed teenager in Stockholm in the early 1980s. “I don’t know where. It could be more than 200, or somewhere between 150 and 200. The thing that’s so extraordinary is, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, it plays well so consistently with audiences.
“It’s always a pleasure to watch.”
Noah Isenberg reads from
Coming Attractions
If you see one new release in a theater over the next two weeks, consider Their Finest, which Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center will screen at Loew Auditorium in Hanover next Friday night at 7.
Danish director Lone Scherfig, whose English-language films include Carey Mulligan’s divine debut in An Education, pays homage both to Great Britain’s Greatest Generation and to moviemaking. It follows a young woman screenwriter from Wales (Gemma Arterton) through the crafting of a based-on-a-true-story film designed to boost morale during the Blitz in 1940. While Arterton carries the picture with grace and a dash of wit, she also gets brilliant support from a cast that includes Bill Nighy as an aging matinee idol rising to the occasion and Jeremy Irons in a sly cameo as the British secretary of war. To reserve tickets ($5 to $8) and learn more, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
Tonight at 7 at Loew Auditorium, the Hopkins Center is screening a period piece that left me a tad cold on first viewing, maybe because I went in with unrealistic expectations. While A Quiet Passion, the biopic about poet Emily Dickinson, is worth seeing for Cynthia Nixon’s lead performance and for sets in the Amherst, Mass., house (now museum) where the poet lived, be prepared for some murky cinematography and wooden supporting performances. For tickets ($5 to $8) and more information, visit hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
On the House
Continuing its weekly series of free classic movies, the Mascoma Film Society screens Say Anything next Wednesday night at 6:30 in the auditorium of Mascoma Regional High School in West Canaan.
Director Cameron Crowe’s 1989 coming-of-age film features John Cusack as a noble underachiever who falls for a beautiful valedictorian (Ione Skye) the summer before she starts college. Treats include John Mahoney, shortly after a similar canny appearance in Moonstruck and before he became the grounding force in the Frasier TV series, stealing scenes as the girl’s protective, skeptical father.
Among some of my favorites still to come in the Mascoma series are free screenings, all starting at 6:30 p.m., of The Princess Bride (July 5), Once (July 19), The Fantastic Mr. Fox (July 26), the documentary Searching for Sugar Man (Aug. 16) and Ang Lee’s martial-arts fable Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Aug. 30).
If you somehow either missed American Graffiti when it came out in 1973 or never got around to it over the ensuing decades, Pentangle Arts is showing the 1950s retrospective that set the template for 1982’s Diner by introducing American audiences to such stars as Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Suzanne Somers and Mackenzie Phillips. While admission is free to the 7:30 p.m. screening on July 6, Pentangle welcomes donations.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.