Apologies for yesterday’s premature post. Let’s try this again. With the full set.
He runs a saloon.
Left politics left behind.
A woman, of course.
We had Paris but
He had the certificate.
Hmmmm, transit papers…
Rick, Ilsa: I’m black!
Nazis here, Jim Crow back home.
Screw ‘As Time Goes By’.
Let’s do it! For love!
Then plan to flee together.
Psych! Get on the plane.
Queered by Rick’s scheme,
Fates entwined like lovers’ limbs.
Beautiful friendship.
and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Mr Skeffingon (1944) is not tittering at the name of the conceited beauty and all-round awful Fanny (Bette Davis), but the sequence right at the end, after she has been brought low (through ageing, a medically dubious bout of dyptheria and some grotesque Perc Westmore makeup) and to the point of accepting the truth of her estranged husband’s words (‘a woman is beautiful when she’s loved, and only then’) just as he, Job (Claude Rains), returns from a Nazi concentration camp – a worn out broken man – and they are able to reunite because he stills loves her and, more importantly, as him tripping over a footstool reveals, he is now blind and cannot see that she is no longer beautiful and so she does not have to learn any kind of moral lesson whatsoever…
Mark Bould 