Wednesday, December 20, 2006
CASABLANCA
My personal choice for all-time favorite movie has to be CASABLANCA. I'm a Humphrey Bogart fan. Ingrid Bergman is beautiful. The rest of the cast are terrific. It's well-written, highly dramatic and an important story.
Does the current generation love it as much as we baby boomers did? It worries me that they apparently don't. Its story is more timely now than it was when I watched it in the 1970s. Yet I wonder if current young adults even understand the conflict between love and duty.
Some Americans are now currently engaged in the war on evil, but many of us are back to ignoring it, running our Cafe Americains, focusing on our own emotional lives.
Yet new SS officers are preparing to enter our cafes. They'll wear headscarves instead of swazticas. And this time, Europe won't be in the fight before us. They're hiding their heads in the Sahara sand. There's no European freedom fighter in sight who're going to rally the band to play La Marseillase in defiance of the Nazis.
I'd like to think that the Capitain Louis of France still retain enough goodness deep inside them to join us at end, after the cafe has been closed and we commit ourselves to the fight against evil. I suspect most of the French and the rest of Europe will keep on drinking Vichy water, but I hope I'm wrong.
Does the current generation love it as much as we baby boomers did? It worries me that they apparently don't. Its story is more timely now than it was when I watched it in the 1970s. Yet I wonder if current young adults even understand the conflict between love and duty.
Some Americans are now currently engaged in the war on evil, but many of us are back to ignoring it, running our Cafe Americains, focusing on our own emotional lives.
Yet new SS officers are preparing to enter our cafes. They'll wear headscarves instead of swazticas. And this time, Europe won't be in the fight before us. They're hiding their heads in the Sahara sand. There's no European freedom fighter in sight who're going to rally the band to play La Marseillase in defiance of the Nazis.
I'd like to think that the Capitain Louis of France still retain enough goodness deep inside them to join us at end, after the cafe has been closed and we commit ourselves to the fight against evil. I suspect most of the French and the rest of Europe will keep on drinking Vichy water, but I hope I'm wrong.
