Radio 4's In Our Time makes its Sheffield debut, with a rare chance to see new host Misha Glenny and guests in action. From its start in 1998 with host Melvyn Bragg, In Our Time has become essential listening around the world as they discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.
Misha Glenny and his guests Ian Christie, Pamela Hutchinson and Sheldon Hall discuss the making of Michael Curtiz’s film Casablanca (1942), its impact then and its growing reputation ever since. Casablanca is famous for the performances of Humphrey Bogart as Rick, owner of Rick’s Café Américain in war time Morocco and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund, once his lover in Paris and now with her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), and for the song As Time Goes By and much more. What particularly interests Misha is how European was the broader cast, with so many of them refugees who knew precisely what was at stake now that the USA had entered the war. When they join to sing the Marseillaise to drown out the singing of German occupiers in Rick’s, the effect is so powerful it’s as if time momentarily stops. This discussion will be recorded for broadcast when In Our Time returns after its summer break.Misha Glenny has been presenting In Our Time since January and is well known as a journalist specialising in Eastern Europe especially the Balkans and as author of McMafia
 
Ian Christie FBA is a renowned British film scholar, Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck University, author and broadcaster who has written extensively on cinema, including works on Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Martin Scorsese, and is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine.
 
Pamela Huchinson is an author, critic, curator and film historian, a columnist at Sight & Sound and the founder-editor of silent cinema website Silent London whose interests include Hollywood and stardom and who is a regular guest on BBC Radio 4’s arts programmes and Radio 3’s Free Thinking.
 
Sheldon Hall is a writer and lecturer on films and television and an Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, contributing to numerous books and journals on British and American film history and was for eleven years the film and theatre critic of the Northern Echo.