Allied (2016)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
In 1942, an intelligence officer in North Africa encounters a female French Resistance fighter on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. When they reunite in London, their relationship is tested by the pressures of war.
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37 films that influenced Allied
What critics say influenced Allied
Two people fall in love in Nazi-occupied Casablanca - stop me if you've heard this one before.
At the very least, it's a nice mix of 'Casablanca' and 'Mr and Mrs Smith'.
Allied is more intimate than epic, so the grandiose moments tend to stand out like a sore thumb, clashing with the Casablanca-esque tone the film works so hard to replicate.
Salvo que mi imaginación haya buscado lo inexistente, me parece que en una toma Brad Pitt adquiere un parecido notable a Humphrey Bogart en Casablanca (1942), de Michael Curtiz.
Su primera parte recuerda al cine clásico fabricado por Hollywood, sobre todo a Casablanca (1942), y, la segunda, propone un viraje que se aleja de dichos elementos para acercar el convoy a los thrillers hitchcockianos (Notorious, Suspicion).
Shot in velvety-rich classic Hollywood style from an original – and yet so very unoriginal – script by Steven Knight (Pawn Sacrifice), Allied comes off like a highlight reel that mimics the look and feel of a whole school of great films, from Casablanca to Hitchcock's Suspicion and Notorious.
The more Zemeckis strains to re-create the romanticism of the wartime films of the 1940s, the more I wished this one was being made by Alfred Hitchcock, who effectively made a variation on this theme with "Suspicion" (1941).
The story, written by Steven Knight and apparently based on some real wartime derring-do, has overtones of Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion, as well as Casablanca, and even Charade.
Instead, we get a play-it-safe thriller with a plot that recalls that of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion yet fails to muster a fraction of either's suspense.
It’s a movie that bows deeply to such classic spy thrillers as Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and a dozen other Second World War-time films, including Casablanca.
Think Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s Notorious.
Or the stars of Notorious, shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1946 in such enveloping close-up that all else—the Nazis, the uranium ore MacGuffin—was forgotten.
Shot in velvety-rich classic Hollywood style from an original – and yet so very unoriginal – script by Steven Knight (Pawn Sacrifice), Allied comes off like a highlight reel that mimics the look and feel of a whole school of great films, from Casablanca to Hitchcock's Suspicion and Notorious.
The story, written by Steven Knight and apparently based on some real wartime derring-do, has overtones of Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion, as well as Casablanca, and even Charade.
Instead, we get a play-it-safe thriller with a plot that recalls that of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion yet fails to muster a fraction of either's suspense.
He’d rather pull off big, showy set pieces like the spectacular opening shot of Max parachuting into the Moroccan desert or the scene in which Max and Marianne consummate their relationship in a car buffeted by a sand storm (a shot shamelessly ripped off from The English Patient).
That old number, you might think—a leftover from The English Patient.
The physical consummation is clear-cut, occurring in the midst of a desert storm in a scene that recalls another 1996 release, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient.
But, for all its echoes of Casablanca and The English Patient, this World War II drama doesn't earn the "iconic" label.
In the film’s best scene, M & M make love inside a car during a sandstorm: It’s like Lawrence of Arabia as a date movie, or maybe The English Patient, only vehicular instead of aerial.
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It reminds us of the way Sylvia Sidney regards Oskar Homolka in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage.
The film is schooled in the ways of Curtiz and Hitchcock, of Lean and Powell/Pressburger (the finale even pays homage, as so many movies from the Spielberg generation do, to John Ford’s The Searchers).
Moving elegantly from its golden-hued first hour in French Morocco to a bombed out—but no less postcard pretty—wartime England, Allied evokes imagery like an expensive mausoleum of the silver screen, from the obvious callbacks to Casablanca to David Lean, the Archers and Carol Reed’s The Third Man , gliding through high-tech recreations of classic wartime movie tropes filtered through Zemeckis’ gifted eye for composition.
Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”
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Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”
Unfortunately, they are played out in such a flatfooted fashion that you’re likely to be reminded not of “Foreign Correspondent,” “Saboteur” or “Notorious” but of the missteps of his later years like “Torn Curtain” and “Topaz.”