To celebrate the third anniversary of The Frida Cinema, the downtown Santa Ana indie/arthouse/all-things cinema space is presenting a rare (and free!) chance to see Michael Curtiz’s 1942 masterpiece Casablanca on the big screen.
But Logan Crow and his crew at The Frida aren’t just throwing any ol’ version of the Bogey classic up on one of the former Fiesta Twin’s two screens Tuesday evening. This Casablanca will be a restored and remastered new digital print.
It’s courtesy of Warner Bros., which is celebrating a different milestone: the 75th anniversary of Casablanca‘s release.
If you haven’t seen it, you don’t have a mom who was cool as mine was in exposing her children to the classics. Based on Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s un-produced stage play Everybody Comes to Rick’s, Casablanca is set in the Moroccan port city just before the still-neutral U.S. entered World War II. Rick’s is a gin joint run by exiled American and former freedom fighter Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart, at his Bogey-ist). Through a twist of fate, Rick comes into possession of two letters of transit, which are very much wanted by Czechoslovak underground leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Laszlo is barely one step ahead of the Nazis who want to persecute him and are very much a presence in Casablanca in general and Rick’s in particular.
However, when Laszlo arrives at Rick’s to procure the letters of transit so he can escape to America, he brings along with him his beautiful wife Ilsa (Ingird Bergman), Blaine’s former lover who left him waiting at a Paris train station. That is because she had found out her husband Laszlo had not died in a concentration camp as she had been led to believe before meeting and falling in love with Blaine, who she left with tremendous heartache and cynicism. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, why did she have to walk into Rick’s!?!
The film—which features superb performances by the above named actors as well as Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Dooley Wilson and Madeleine LeBeau, Rick’s discarded girlfriend and teary-eyed “La Marseillaise” singer, who had been the last surviving Casablanca cast member before her death on May 1, 2016—is presented at The Frida thanks to support from State Farm’s Eddie Quillares Jr.
Show time is 8 p.m. Tuesday and while tickets are free, seating could be limited. Visit thefridacinema.org to RSVP and arrive early just in case. And even if you can’t make it, marvel at what this third anniversary represents: really cool, unique and important cinema in Orange County and especially DTSA. For proof, just check out what else they have cooking this week alone:
XX, an anthology movie of four deadly tales from four killer women—Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body), Jennifer Lynch (Boxing Helena, Surveillance), Jovanka Vuckovic (The Captured Bird) and, in her directorial debut, St. Vincent herself, Annie Clark. Today at 5, 7 and 9 p.m., Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. and Wednesday and Thursday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m.
The Salesman (Forušande), the Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film from Iran, which I wrote about here: “Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman Channels Arthur Miller.” Today at 5 and 7:30 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday at 2:30 and 5 p.m. and Thursday at 2:30 p.m.
Burlesque: Heart of the Glitter Tribe, a New York Film Critics Circle presentation that is beamed into theaters and is a candid, behind-the-scenes look at the personalities at the heart of today’s new wave of burlesque, includes an exclusive on-screen conversation with stars and creators Zora Von Pavonine, Babs Jamboree, Angelique DeVil, Isaiah Esquire and Jon Manning. Wednesday at 8 p.m. (Writer’s note-This entry was corrected from an earlier version; apologies for any confusion.)
I Am Not Your Negro, the Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature about James Baldwin’s incomplete manuscript for Remember This House, which was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and successive assassinations of the late author’s close friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Friday at 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Saturday-Sunday at 11:30 a.m. and 2, 4:30, 6:30 and 9 p.m. and Monday-Thursday, Feb. 27-March 2, at 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.
Mad Max: Fury Road Black & Chrome Edition, OC Weekly’s Friday Night Freakouts presentation and the recipient of 10 Academy Award nominations in 2015 (including Best Picture) and six Oscars (including Best Achievement in Film Editing), which is shown in Aussie director George Miller’s preferred black and chrome as opposed to the color version that made worldwide bank. Friday at 11 p.m.
Tenemos la carne (We Are the Flesh) is director Emiliano Rocha Minter’s mind-blowing, disturbing, polarizing, shocking, mesmerizing and altogether original surreal Mexican art house mind-bender. Saturday at 10 p.m. (No one under age 18 will be admitted).
Here’s looking at you, Frida!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.