Morocco (1930)

Approved, despite the fact that one of the establishing shots has a fully topless woman.  I think it was supposed to show the cultural differences of 1930s Morocco, but it almost seemed like Josef von Sternberg was showing off how cosmopolitan he was.  There are also some unfortunate dolls that could best be described as racially insensitive.  There's also some implication of womanizing and prostitution.   Still, we're in the "Approved" era of coding so I can't be surprised by anything.

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg

I'm so deep in the weeds, guys.  I have fallen behind on writing and I'm ashamed and stressed out by this self-imposed misery that I've created for myself.  I am three movies behind and I'm trying to find time to do anything.  But I also have five kids who have oddly been more needy than normal.  I know.  I am trying to ultimately complain about my hobby when I have lovely children who want to spend time with their dad.  Please forgive if there's a tone of "rushed" as you read this because I am desperate to get ahead of this to-do list that I've created for myself.

Now, I'm already writing from a point of weakness.  Morocco, while probably not one of those unimpeachable classics, is a famous enough movie to be recognized by cinephiles as a bit of a classic.  What puts me in a weird place is that...I didn't like it.  I tend to like classics.  You would think, with all of the elements that went into this motion picture, that I would be the biggest fan ever.  After all, I couldn't help but think that this movie was a forerunner to Casablanca, one of my favorite movies of all time.  (That sentence alone makes me incredibly basic.)  It's not Morocco's fault that, tonally, Casablanca borrowed elements from this.  But it also is a movie that feels painfully devoid of substance, especially in comparison to Casablanca.

I know.  They are different movies.  To say that Morocco sucks because Casablanca is better when Morocco and Casablanca are aiming for drastically different goals.  My big argument is that Morocco is almost a simple film.  (Again, for all of the people willing to fight me about not liking a classic, that's a pretty damning sentence against me.  I am dismissing a lot with that sentence.)  If I'm being as fully critical as I feel, this almost feels like Morocco's only purpose for existing is to provide a romance against the background of a foreign country.  And that's where I get incredibly frustrated with the movie.

It's not that I don't like romance stories.  As I get older, I tend to like them more and more. For anyone who knows me or follows this blog closely, I tend to be skeptical of many romantic comedies.  But straight romances?  Yeah, I kind of like them.  Anyway, I'm not even against formula.  Setting a romance against the struggles of the Foreign Legion?  That could work.  But it feels like a lot of this movie focused on spectacle and ambiance and little on the emotion between the couple.  Listen, I thought that I liked Gary Cooper.  I mean, he was Mr. Deeds.  He's been in a bunch of movies where he plays this "Golly, I just tryin' to do the right thing, ma'am" character over and over again and I never questioned those performances.  But this is a movie where Cooper plays a bit of a scoundrel.  He's a scoundrel that we're supposed to quasi-like.  But the thing is...I really don't like him.  It's actually pretty odd that Amy Jolly likes Lieutenant Brown considering that he's kind of terrible.

But going back to Cooper, he plays Brown exactly like he plays those "Aw shucks" characters.  So we have this character who presents himself as a salt-of-the-earth guy who almost no moral code.  Now, I get what Brown sees in Amy.  After all, she's a performer who made him feel like a million bucks. Now, in universe, Brown has gotten to know woman after woman.  He's a womanizer in this.  But I can always pretend that there's something about Amy with her performance or her entire demeanor that explains that he's willing to abandon his old persona for this woman, there's a little bit of evidence for that.  After all, we don't know much about the other women in Brown's life, so that gives us wiggle room for that explanation.  But what does Amy Jolly see in Brown?  From Amy's perspective, she's done one show in Morocco and Brown was just another audience member ogling her.  There is no real meet-cute.  He just shows up in her dressing room and gives her the eyes.  That's not incredibly compelling.

So, their relationship origin story has very almost seedy start.  But that's not crazy.  After all, if the story is about how these two vapid people bring each other purpose and meaning, there could be a story there.  Instead, these two keep doing bananas toxic things to each other.  It becomes a movie that's almost a self-flaggelating narrative full of solvable problems that these characters ignore.  One of the foundations of the movie is Tom willing to abandon the Foreign Legion for the sake of Amy.  He thinks that Amy wouldn't go for it and it's this moment of vulnerability.  It's probably the most characterization that the character experiences. Now, the movie could become an external conflict as Tom and Amy try escaping the Foreign Legion and his responsibilities.  But what actually happens is so much more frustrating.  She's gone for a second to grab her things and then he leaves her.

We've seen this beat in movies before.  After all, there's the thought that characters do self-sacrificing things for love, even if we all see that it's a mistake.  But there's not a lot of believability to this moment.  When he writes his message on the mirror, it has the same amount of sense that Jonathan Kent has in Man of Steel when he sacrifices himself to the tornado.  Amy's life isn't exactly great.  She seems incredibly broken inside.  The only person that she cares for is Tom.  While running from the Foreign Legion isn't ideal, we see what she's willing to do without Tom. She's about to get married to someone for whom she cares little (but has a lot of money!).  The movie ends with one of the few shots I really enjoyed, her following him out to the desert.  Also, Tom was going to get shot in the Foreign Legion.  He even predicted the moment when they were going to throw him under the bus. Yet, it's implied that there's some kind of element of self-sacrifice to Tom's choice to leave her behind?  It's silly.

This is also one of those romances that has a character that full-on bothers me.  In romance movies that need some semblance of a happy ending (although Morocco leans more tragic than happy), there's always a guy who is willing to do the right thing, even if it means his own misery.  Of course, we never really get to see that misery.  Instead, that character continually seems noble.  His only negative trait, in the grand scheme of things, is that he's goofy looking and rich.  Yeah, that's not a great story for me.  

This is what I'm left with.  The film snob in me wants to be the guy who says, "Morocco?  Great film. A classic."  But if I didn't know about Morocco beforehand, I would dismiss this movie as incredibly forgettable.  Like, I've seen a bunch of movies that have attempted the same thing, only done better.  That's flippant.  But I've also watched a bunch of romantic movies from yesteryear that have kind of been lost to time and they've told similar stories...and I've believed the characters.  This is more spectacle than actual story.  I wish I was invested in these characters, but I never bought the romance, even for a moment.  For those people who love the movie, continue loving it.  Maybe I wasn't in the right headspace.  Maybe I'm too harsh on the movie because it is a low-key classic. 

But Morocco didn't do anything for.