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Screenwriter · 1901–1995

Howard Koch

2
briefs
13:00
average
26 min
in total
On film.briefs2
13:00

Casablanca

Michael Curtiz · 1942

A 1942 Warner Bros. romantic drama set in Vichy-controlled Casablanca, where American expatriate Rick Blaine must choose between rekindling a wartime romance with Ilsa Lund and helping her husband, resistance leader Victor Laszlo, escape to continue fighting the Nazis. Directed by Michael Curtiz, written by Julius and Philip Epstein, Howard Koch and Casey Robinson, and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, it is a tightly constructed studio picture whose enduring power lies in its moral economy, disciplined craft and refusal to separate personal longing from political consequence.

13:00

Letter from an Unknown Woman

Max Ophüls · 1948

Max Ophüls’ 1948 adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella follows Lisa Berndle’s lifelong devotion to concert pianist Stefan Brand, rendered in flashback through her final letter. Joan Fontaine’s restrained performance and Franz Planer’s under-lit cinematography sustain a mood of quiet accumulation, where emotional weight gathers not in climaxes but in silences, glances, and withheld names.