Today we begin announcing the winners of the recent Hall of Fame balloting, which will be inducted alongside the "grandfathered" honorees we inducted this past week. The eleven films that were inducted in the voting process will be announced in alphabetical order.
“Tell people you love movies, and they'll often immediately ask you that impossible question: ‘so what's your favorite movie?’ You can stammer and equivocate all you like, but in the end, they just want to hear one title. That title, for me, is almost always Casablanca.
“I know that it can be dismissed as an obvious choice, or worse: a dull one. Casablanca doesn't play any major role in the history of cinema. It didn't introduce any new techniques or signify a breakthrough of some kind. It's not by some fancy auteur – though I would argue that Curtiz is generally underrated as a director.
“What it is, however, is a movie full of pure pleasure, not necessarily my absolute favorite at any time but a film I can watch over and over and enjoy every single time. It may not have been revolutionary, but it was expertly crafted in one of the most successful movie factories that ever existed. And then, due to some unmeasurable, impossible to replicate movie magic, every single element came together perfectly. The actors are all perfect for their parts. Every line (except maybe for the one about cannon fire) lands. And the ending is one of the most memorable ones ever put on film.
“Yes, Casablanca is corny. But as one of its screen writers, Julius Epstein, remarked: ‘When corn works, there's nothing better.’ Corn has never worked better than it did in Casablanca.”
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