Quotes from Aljean Harmetz

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

Movies today are bigger, brighter, technically dazzling, awesome in their computer generated special effects. But they are also thinner; they lack the thick layers of character actors who brought depth to the background and refracted the stars' light, so that it formed a different and more complicated image.

Today, any movie that didn't show Rick and Ilsa sweatily grappling with each other's naked bodies in Rick's apartment above the café would be considered old-fashioned. But graphic sex wipes out ambiguity, and the ambiguity in Casablanca, the uncertainty about events and motives, is one of the things that still entices us.

The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then - love lost for the good of the world - and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. No movie can last if it cannot find new things to say to new generations. Captain Renault, the one gray character in a black and white time, would've been amused.

It is a mistake to confuse old with golden, a word within which those letters are often trapped. But the old Hollywood studios did have a golden era, when art, and commerce, and hard work fitted comfortably together.