I don't know why I even bother anymore - *he said crankily* - but
here it is. Up on my web host for just a couple of days. The NYT
writer couldn't help but inject a panoply of contemporaneous political
"echos" / "teachable moments" normally reserved for the political
opinion pages - nevertheless, the few pics featured are nice. (If the
images don't show up, lemme know and I'll post direct links.) -d.
[1]-----
By Jason Farago for the New York Times - Thursday, Dec. 1, 2022
RONALD LAUDER'S PERSONAL COLLECTION OF MEMORABILIA FROM "CASABLANCA"
FILLS A ROOM OF THE NEUE GALERIE, ON THE UPPER EAST SIDE.
Round up the unusual suspects. "Casablanca" has turned 80, and the
most esteemed of all Hollywood classics enters its octogenarian years
with a new ultra-high-definition DVD release.
There's also, right now in New York, an engaging new display of
"Casablanca" artifacts, though you won't find it at MoMA or the Museum
of the Moving Image. Of all the joints in all the towns in all the
world, the relics of this paragon of the Hollywood studio system have
ended up in … a museum of German and Austrian modern art.
That would be the Neue Galerie, conceived by the cosmetics baron
Ronald S. Lauder and the art dealer Serge Sabarsky (1912-1996), which
opened in 2001 in a former Vanderbilt mansion on a prime corner of
Fifth Avenue.
It's celebrating its first 20 years with a showcase of its surviving
founder's own collection: not only jewels of modern Mitteleuropa, but
ancient sculpture, medieval broadswords and reliquaries, and gleaming
oddities from Renaissance cabinets of curiosities.
Least expected are more than five dozen posters, lobby cards, props
and press materials from the collector's favorite movie, which he
reports seeing "at least 25 to 30 times" — and whose memorabilia he
has been buying up with foxhound-grade avidity.
"The Ronald S. Lauder Collection" had its grand opening on the evening
of November's midterm elections — whose result, by the way, Lauder
may have decisively influenced, having spent millions on lawsuits and
campaign advertising for Republicans in New York, where the G.O.P.
flipped four congressional seats. (Among his animating causes are
crime, taxes, and a proposed wind farm off the Hamptons shoreline.)
"I'm no ogre," Lauder assured The Times this month in an interview at
Café Sabarsky, the charmingly ersatz Viennese cafe on the Neue
Galerie's ground floor, and, certainly, the 500-odd objects here do
not have an outward suggestion of barbarism. If anything, its rooms of
princely baubles are rather oversaturated, as if Lauder didn't know
where to stop; drawings by Egon Schiele are hung sky-high, essentially
invisible, and stuffed vitrines induced in me the novel feeling of
ivory fatigue.
The unexpected highlight is the "Casablanca" gallery, the show's
smallest and densest, which in its way fits right into an institution
devoted to Central European genius and American inheritances.
Its walls are covered with soft-focus images of Humphrey Bogart and
Ingrid Bergman, and posters both printed and painted. ("They Have a
Date With Fate in … CASABLANCA," reads one hand-lettered display
from 1942, the title sparkling gold.)
Lobby cards — those black-and-white stills you'd once see by the
popcorn stand — take us back to the louche purgatory of Rick's Café
Américain, where the dashing Resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul
Henreid) is gathering intelligence, and the charmingly corrupt Captain
Renault (Claude Rains) is sizing up the loveliest exiles.
POSTERS AND LOBBY CARDS COVER THE WALLS WITH IMAGES OF THE FILM'S
STARS, HUMPHREY BOGART AND INGRID BERGMAN.
[2]
DETAIL OF A BRASS LAMP, FRINGED WITH IMITATION JEWELS, USED IN THE
MOVIE.
A HAND-LETTERED DISPLAY FROM 1942 ANNOUNCES THE FILM'S TITLE IN
SPARKLING GOLD.
You'll also find memorabilia from the film's postwar releases in
France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and, by 1952, Germany.
Bergman appears in solo splendor on the German poster, beaming above a
set piece of fez-topped musicians. There's a brass lamp from Rick's,
fringed with imitation gemstones, and two rattan chairs where Europe's
desperate and displaced drank their cognacs and plotted their escapes.
Looping in the background is "As Time Goes By," performed by Dooley
Wilson, a veteran of the Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theater
Project, in the role of the nightclub crooner Sam.
Lauder apparently also owns the 1940 Buick Phaeton in which Rains
drives our heroes to the Casablanca airport in the film's final act.
Lauder wanted to station the car outside the Neue Galerie for the run
of the show, but no dice. Even with a net worth of $4.5 billion,
nobody beats alternate-side parking regulations.
"Casablanca" premiered in New York on Nov. 26, 1942; Warner Bros.
pushed up its release date to capitalize on the excitement around that
month's Allied invasion of North Africa. It opened nationally in
January 1943, and its tale of refugees and people smugglers was not
only topical; it was nearly autofiction.
A stunning number of its performers were Jewish refugees or anti-Nazi
exiles — among them Conrad Veidt, previously a star of the Berlin
studio system, who played Major Strasser; S.Z. Sakall, a Hungarian
Jewish actor, as the club's affable headwaiter; and Peter Lorre in the
small but crucial role of Ugarte, who sells exit visas to the rich and
desperate.
The French actress Madeleine Lebeau, in the small role of Rick's
jilted mistress, cries real tears during the film's stirring
performance of "La Marseillaise"; she too was a refugee, fleeing via
Lisbon to Mexico, and then to Hollywood. She escaped with her husband,
Marcel Dalio (born Israel Mosche Blauschild), who plays the croupier
at Rick's, and who left France after antisemitic critics denounced his
appearance in "The Rules of the Game."
THE PRODUCTION'S TRANSIT PAPERS FOR VICTOR LASZLO, "SIGNED" BY CHARLES
DE GAULLE, WHICH RICK FINALLY HANDS OVER IN "CASABLANCA."
When it plays in the revival houses on Valentine's Day, when it
surfaces as the late movie after "Nightline," "Casablanca" still
endures as a wartime love affair, with Bogie and Bergman letting each
other go in the airport fog.
But for me "Casablanca" has always been a movie of visas and exit
stamps, embassies and expediters, bribed officials and underground
operators. It paints the modern world as the province of emigrants and
evacuees, and subordinates the most enthralling of all Hollywood
romances to the welfare of the persecuted.
Which is why I was so astonished to discover, in Lauder's collection,
an extraordinary relic: the original (prop) letter of transit that
sets the plot in motion, made out to Victor Laszlo and "signed" by
General de Gaulle. The prop passports are here too, with Bergman's and
Henreid's photographs stamped with the seal of the Casablanca colonial
administration.
I couldn't believe I was seeing them, and seeing them here, in a
museum of German and Austrian art. It was as if these fictional travel
documents concentrated all the exiles and displacements that built
midcentury American culture, of Mies van der Rohe and Marlene
Dietrich, of "Doctor Faustus" and "Broadway Boogie-Woogie."
They burn, especially, with the shame of knowing that a contemporary
"Casablanca" cast member could probably not procure one. Even before
the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced an estimated five
million to flee, the world has been shaken by the largest refugee
crisis since everybody came to Rick's. The United Nations now puts the
number of displaced at 100 million — one in every 78 people on Earth
— from Afghanistan and Venezuela, from Central America and Myanmar,
and above all from Syria, whose civil war will soon enter its 12th
year.
THE PROP PASSPORT FOR ILSA LUND, INGRID BERGMAN'S CHARACTER.
Nevertheless, under President Donald J. Trump, the United States cut
its quotas for refugee admissions to the lowest level ever. The
numbers have barely budged under his successor. Though President Biden
increased the cap of the refugee admissions program, his government
has come nowhere close to fulfilling it; just 25,400 refugees were
admitted in the last fiscal year, leaving 80 percent of the places
unfilled.
The fundamental things apply. In "Casablanca" the Hollywood system
reached the acme of its artistic and civic potential, and on that
Orientalist soundstage, as the displaced of Europe oscillated in and
out of character, these foreigners offered America a new
self-portrait. It taught us that love and displacement went hand in
hand, that ideals were thicker than blood.
"I bet they're asleep in New York," Bogie mopes into his tumbler of
whisky at the end of the first reel. "I bet they're asleep all over
America." But the passionate clarity of "Casablanca" was not something
we only dreamed.
_THE RONALD S. LAUDER COLLECTION - THROUGH FEB. 13, NEUE GALERIE NEW
YORK, 1048 FIFTH AVENUE, 212-628-6200; neuegalerie.org [3]._
-------------------------
From: MoPo List <mopo-l@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU> on behalf of Tom Martin
<dreamfact...@hollywooddreamfactory.com>
Sent: Friday, December 2, 2022 5:07 PM
To: MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU <MoPo-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU>
Subject: Re: [MOPO] Casablanca collection on display in NYC
could not see the article unless i subscribed ,,,,,oh well
Iam not wanting more mail soguess i dont get to see
Thanks Charles for the Kindness
Tom
Hollywood dream factory®
since 1977
On 2022-12-02 15:53, Christopher Quarles wrote:
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