The Survival of Casablanca and The Ever Changing Classic

The word classic doesn’t mean what it used to…

Some people put it as the best film of all time, others as one of the best. Humphrey Bogart is electric and Ingrid Bergman is breath taking and the writing is a stand out. So why have I never had a single conversation about Casablanca with anyone my age.

I didn’t notice it at first. I would tell people about how wonderful Casablanca is and they would go

“Oh yeah, great movie, haven’t seen it, but they say it’s great.”

It’s ok if you haven’t seen a classic film, I don’t want to be a snob. This is more about the fact that I have never… ever… ever… met a single person my age who has seen this movie. It’s not only the fact that people haven’t seen it, but it’s the fact that when I bring it up they look at me like I’m crazy. Even my bff’s (best film friends), have never seen this movie.

It’s sad. I feel like a fossil. I understand discovering the film late, I certainly did, but I’m 26 now and no one has watched this randomly on TV before? Not even with their parents? What am I even saying, no one watches TV anymore. I do sound like a fossil.

What’s happening is that classic films are disappearing from the collective consciousness. They are not being respected or revered anymore. The word classic in itself is changing. Casablanca was a classic movie to my parents’ parents. So when it was time for my mother and father to pass down their movie wisdom they passed down their classics not their parents.

Movies like The Godfather, Butch Cassidy, and Raging Bull. They’re good movies, but they all came out after 1969. Casablanca came out in 1942. Which means I am well versed in DeNiro, but not Bogart.

This is where the definition of classic and ancient is ever changing. If I saw a movie in the late 90s, early 2000s. In thirty years or less that movie is going to become a classic for me. One example of this would be if I put 2002’s Spider-Man 2 for my child instead of 1978s Superman.Therefore Spider-Man 2 will become the new staple classic super hero movie. This in itself is not bad, what survives from long gone eras are only the best things. But what happens when everything that’s not Citizen Kane from starts to fade away?

Film is always being reintroduced to us in one way or another. A great example of this is 2016’s La La Land. Movie buffs would recognize all the different references to older musicals, but for the rest of us, the movie was a fresh new never seen experience. The problem with this is that we cannot depend on filmmakers to reintroduce us to great moments of the past. We need to see them for ourselves.

It’s okay to not see everything that your parents or your grandparents watched, but some things do deserve that merit. Casablanca deserves that merit. This was the movie that made their two lead actors into legends, and they would go on to continue to define the 40s and 50s. Plus the movie is fun: it’s funny, witty, cheeky, romantic, heavy, beautifully shot, and modern in a lot of aspects.

So what can we do? It’s not like we can watch everything that’s not realistic. Instead we are going to have to re-classify the classics. The Matrix which came out in 1999 is a classic film, but so is a movie that came 50 years before it? Maybe a solution could be to divide Hollywood by monikers. The studio system, the new Hollywood, the new new Hollywood, but that doesn’t sound right. We could divide them by eras. “This is a classic movie from the 50s.” but that’s what we do now and classic films are disappearing.

What we need to do is to make these movies exciting for a new audience. Blu- Ray and digital releases that look crisp and sound incredible. Plus the behind the scenes content needs to be definitive as well as include a history lesson on why the film is important. Today if I want to watch a classic movie, I have to go to the Criterion Collection Channel, but that is so expensive. An annual plan cost one hundred dollars. What if I only want to watch three films, would I pay one hundred dollars just for those three films? Of course not. Plus the Criterion Collection while being curated does not explain to you fully why these movies are such a big deal. You can watch Casablanca and have fun; but what does it matter if you don’t know that this is an important film because the movie mixed film genres in an era where you just didn’t do that.

We need to make the classics exciting again because their merit is not enough anymore. To remedy this Netflix should have the movies, plus a short fifteen minute documentary on why it matters and what it did to film.

What do you think? Do you agree, disagree with me. Let me know please and if you enjoyed this article please follow me on here or on twitter. Thank you.