Notes To Myself, April 2013

Two nights ago, I watched CASABLANCA for the second time, and again, I have to ask why such a well-regarded film leaves me empty.

The most obvious factor against it is the appalling score by Max Steiner, whose work I have never liked. As usual for him, the score is too obvious: "We've got Germans here, I'll play 'Deutschland über alles.' Oh, look, it's Paris; I'll play 'La Marseillaise.' Every emotion is underlined, pinpointed, and specified with blaring orchestration: "You will react like THIS.'"

And that, I believe, extends to the entire film: it takes you by the hand and tells you how to interpret the images and moods, what to feel as the frames pass by. It leaves nothing to the imagination, nothing to your own personal perspective or judgement. For example, it cannot leave Rick to help the Bulgarian couple and to allow us to judge his intervention; no, his help must be underlined, pointed out and reinforced by the other characters, the direction and the glaring, blaring music.

As a fascinating contrast, I would cite Renoir's LA RÈGLE DU JEU, a film that refuses to take your hand, or to pinpoint what and how you should feel about it. The result is remarkably disturbing and effective.

Yet even if I stuck with the Hollywood studio system from that era, I could mention Huston's ASPHALT JUNGLE, which again refuses to take your hand. (And I note, as well, that Miklos Rozsa goes places with his five-minute score that Steiner never dreamed of.)

I need to think about this: the danger of too much audience control.

A side note: I recently watched the film ZODIAC twice, and again, despite the obvious high quality of that film, I believe that something is missing. Is it the lack of subtext? -- because, after all, ZODIAC goes out of its way to put its inner workings right there on the screen. Case in point: the sequence in which the two detectives enter the newsroom and walk through ghostly walls of cipher code. All right, all right, we get the point. These details are best implied, not shown. Showing them is all too tidy, and it leaves us with nothing to mull over when the final credits have rolled. Again, Renoir did this kind of thing with so much more finesse in LA RÈGLE DU JEU, and he left the subtexts in the sub, for the viewers to discover on their own.

"I must remember this...."