Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Is this a reach?

Flipping across the dial tonight (what's a dial?) the wife and I ended up watching "Casablanca" on Turner Classic Movies. It's seems SO cliche to say what a GREAT movie this is, but it really IS a great movie! Watching a film where you see people in conflict actually beginning to steer their lives in a better direction and choose good over evil, as Victor Laslo tells Rick, is simply amazing. Just wonderful.

It reminded me of another Bogart movie I haven't seen in years: "Key Largo". I may be going out on a limb here and tieing the ridiculous and the sublime to the same hitching post, but did you ever notice the common theme this movie shares with the Steven Segal movie "Under Seige"?

The bad guys come in and take over a hotel/ship little knowing they have a trained killer in their midst. In the end, both heroes (Bogie and Segal) take out the bad guys who are not a match for the hero's military training. Coincidence or something more?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hmmm, well I'd think the makers of Under Siege would certainly be familiar with Casablanca. (A favorite film of mine.) I don't know if they were directly influenced by Bogie or not. The theme of the world weary hero forced to take action is a common one in books, films, etc. Alan Ladd in Shane comes to mind. In fact the 'retired gunfighter' plot is central to many westerns and a lot of Segal's films, come to think of it. In Out for Justice, Hard to Kill, On Dangerous Ground, and other prepositional phrase movies, Segal usually falls back on his past to deal with problems in the present.

February 02, 2006 6:18 PM  
Blogger The Big Cheese said...

Just pimping.

March 07, 2006 11:54 PM  

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