Favourite Film

Today my favourite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yesterday it was Casablanca. Tomorrow it might be Annie Hall. In other words a favourite film can be dependent on loads of variables like the weather, my mood or whether Blues won. I was going to tackle this topic by discussing what makes films favourites or best. However, it’s a bit difficult trying to prove a point when the subject is visual.

Then, when I was considering some of my favourite films, I realised that I was remembering words and phrases which have stuck with me. So I’m going to have a look at some of them with an eye to looking out for the writers and that seems appropriate in the Dead Good Poets' Blog.

These aren’t in any order:

Considering I started thinking about this on Valentine’s Day I have to begin with Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart’s Rick saying to Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa ‘We’ll always have Paris’. I would imagine that most of us have a similar feeling about a romantic affair in some place that doesn’t need to be Paris.

The writing of the script is a little tangled so this is a brief version. The first writers assigned to the script were twins Julius and Philip Epstein who left in 1942 to work on another film. While they were gone, the other credited writer, Howard Koch, was assigned. When the Epstein brothers returned they were reassigned to Casablanca. The Epstein brothers and Koch never worked in the same room at the same time.

‘Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn’ is a line from the 1939 film Gone with the Wind starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. The line is spoken by Rhett Butler (Gable), as his last words to Scarlett O'Hara (Leigh). Basically the script was by Sidney Howard but others were brought in to reduce the running time to a mere 3 hours and 41 minutes.

Have you ever casually looked in the mirror and halted, made sure no one was around before yelling at said mirror ‘You Talking to Me?’ more than once, of course, and in different poses. The script for Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader but famously that phrase was adlibbed by Robert de Niro and kept in the film.

There are loads of quotes from Woody Allen films that I could use but Annie Hall is my favourite film by him. ‘Honey, there’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick’. Not particularly the funniest line in the film (and there is one line I’m definitely not using) but it has a sort of resonance for me. Allen’s co-writer was Marshall Brickman.

I know I have used these words a couple of times but can’t remember why. ‘I’ll have what she’s having’. Sally (Meg Ryan) to Harry (Billy Crystal) in When Harry met Sally. I had to have something by Nora Ephron.

How many times have I fantasized about saying “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk”. Dirty Harry and the script was by the husband-and-wife team of Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. Well, do ya?

I can’t not have this: ‘whenever you look up, there I shall be--and whenever I look up there will be you.’ Gabriel Oak to Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd. The 1967 one with Julie Christie, obviously. The film adaption of the Thomas Hardy novel was by Frederic Raphael. I’m not sure about screenplays.

I need to finish this as I could go on for ages but I do want to fit in some lines from the film My Dinner with Andre. ‘I treated myself to a taxi...when I finally came in, Debbie was home from work and I told her all about my dinner with Andre’. The film was written by and starred André Gregory and Wallace Shawn as fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. It brings back a time and place and me rushing home to tell someone about something similar.

It Could Have Been Moonlight

Walking the river path
after the movie
was right
letting images fade
in their own time
until you pointed
and for a second
we were stones again
washed by a perfect
ripple of seats

you whispered
it could have been moonlight

as across the water
a neon played
with a high tide
we smiled
full of illusions
that night.

First published in Equinox, November 2002.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.