Hugh Hefner’s favourite movie of all time
Hugh Hefner was continually fascinated by the inner drives of human beings. A firm understanding of desire was, after all, essential to his work as the publisher of Playboy Magazine, which traded in the erotic desires of men – often at the expense of women. Few films offer such a neat analysis of desire as this: Hefner’s favourite movie of all time.
In 1953, Hugh Hefner established a multibillion-dollar industry with a few provocative photos of actress Marilyn Monroe. Published in the very first issue, those photographs sold 50,000 copies of Playboy Magazine and made Hefner a millionaire practically overnight. Hefner batted off accusations that the magazine catered to adolescent fantasies. He maintained that if the people of America wanted to truly enjoy life, they needed to throw off their puritanical understanding of sex and liberate themselves. This, he argued, was Playboy’s function: to usher in a new era of hedonism, freedom and joy.
The success of Playboy made Hefner the embodiment of the lifestyle his magazine promoted. His readers imagined him spending long summer days lounging in a jacuzzi and even longer nights frolicking on a revolving bed with sexually generous playboy bunnies. While such behaviour made him second-wave feminism’s enemy number one, he possessed an emotional sensitivity and scholarly prowess that made him difficult to demonise.
That same sensitivity reveals itself in his favourite film choice. “My favourite movie of all time is Casablanca,” he told the American Film Institute. “We run classic films at the Mansion every Friday and Saturday, and I do notes on them, etcetera. But what started all that a dozen years ago was Casablanca when it celebrated its 50th anniversary. It has everything: a fantastic script, adventure, romance, unrequited love, friendship, everything.”
Frequently cited as one of the best romantic thrillers of all time, Casablanca was released in 1942, when more than a million Americans were off fighting on fronts worldwide. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, it tells the story of Rick, an American nightclub owner living in the titular Algerian city during the Vichy occupation. After his old flame, Ilsa, reenters the frame, he’s put in the rather difficult position of choosing between the woman he loves and helping her new husband, a Czechoslovak resistance fighter, escape from Casablanca and continue his fight against the Nazis.
You can revisit a clip from the classic noir romance below.
