Argumentative Essay On Casablanca

“Show, not tell.” That’s what they all tell you. What exactly is so wrong with telling and not showing? It can come across as campy, or ruin a moment that could’ve been portrayed better with visual imagery. Telling is the bane of film, books and everything-art. I’ll conceded that telling more than showing a movie walks a fine line of making or breaking the flow of the story, but if done properly, I think telling can lift the life of a movie to new heights. I rest my case in the classic Casablanca. The masters of the screen during the Golden Age of film grasped dialogue in ways we cannot comprehend or reach nowadays. What they did so well during then is now considered the cardinal sin of movies now.
In 1982, the journalist Chuck Ross, in an experiment for Film Comment, mailed the script of Casablanca to 217 agencies under a different title and under a different authorship name. Although many rejected it for external reasons, eighty-one agencies read it and of those, fifty-three did not recognize it as the classic. But here’s the cherry on top: forty-one agencies criticized the iconic, Oscar-winning script with harsh words. One wrote, “Story line is thin. Too much

He is handsome (like how no other forty year old can be), selfish, secretive and a scoundrel—for lack of a better description, he’s a quieter Han Solo but sporting much more unpredictable elements. You know that his love with Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa is forbidden, yet you root for them. Their chemistry as both enemies and lovers whose past goes back for years feels so real and unique, probably due to their lack of interaction on set. But while Bogart and Bergman obviously control the screen, it is the memorable “As Time Goes By” song that makes the film. When the song is introduced as the once-lovers’ theme, Curtiz chooses to focus on Bergman’s bittersweet gaze, and that’s more than enough to make it feel like it is our song as