Movie Friday: Here's an interesting post from NR's Corner on innovative, groundbreaking movies:

Several readers have complained about my dissing of 2001. I stand my ground. There's one point a couple readers have made though I will concede. They say if I'd seen it when it first came out I would think differently. That is undoubtedly true. But some movies -- and books and bands and art -- are significant because they break new ground and some are significant because they are timeless. I'm sure there are other Cornerites more qualified to discuss that point at length. But it seems to me that 2001 was pathbreaking but it wasn't timeless. I feel the same way about Citizen Kane, by the way. I watched it in film class in college so I know all about the groundbreaking techniques used in the film. But those techniques have now been absorbed by the trade. What's left is a pioneering movie which is more interesting as a historical document in the history cinema than as a movie.

I've made the same observation myself. Let me put it in the context of a favorite actor of mine, Humphrey Bogart. Michael Curtiz's Casablanca is one of my all-time favorites. It's a stirring, heavyhanded melodrama with great performances, outsized characters, and a zippy script. But it is, as a cinematic achievement, wholly inferior to John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Sierra Madre takes a fairly simple morality tale (more or less an updating of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale) and brings it to life through outstanding use of black and white film, pioneering use of location shooting (i.e., refusing to "pretty things up"), and iconoclastic use of casting (e.g., Bogart, so frequently a hero or anti-hero, is neither in this film). Casablanca is a fun, superficially symbolic story on a thoroughly conventional canvas, while Sierra Madre is an allegorical story told with great artistic merit.

So why would I rather watch Casablanca any day of the week? So much of what made Sierra Madre unique and astounding (and, at the time, unpopular) has slowly become part of the film vernacular, much the way the pioneering techniques of Alfred Hitchcock literally created the cinematic syntax of horror and suspense films. Casablanca, which may have been the best "B" movie ever, has dressy but unconvincing sets, low comedy, crowd-pleasing musical numbers, and a Max Steiner score that is constantly barging in on the dialogue; meanwhile, the story is pure soap opera.

As for Sierra Madre, its outstanding features were either co-opted by convention or overcome by events: casting against type became more common as the studios' monopoly on actors began to crumble; the dominance of Technicolor meant that audiences forgot how to watch B&W movies (that is, B&W in the late-40s/early-50s became associated with lower budgets, rather than artistic choice); location filming became the norm, and John Ford's epics quickly outclassed any location shooting that came before. What's left is, as stated above, a historical document worth pointing to and saying, "Huston was the first one to do that!"

Casablanca, on the other hand, was and always will be an exercise in pure movie enjoyment.