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:
