A classic wartime/noir pic & entertaining as-all-get-out despite the bad casting of the romantic leads

Rating: 8/10 (6 October 2016)

I still enjoy watching Casablanca, mainly for the snappy, rapier-wit dialogue written by the amazing Epstein brothers in the first half of pic. Peter Lorre's lines as "Ugarte" with Bogart never fail to get a laugh out of audiences: "You despise me, don't you?" Bogart: "Well, if I gave you any thought I probably would." Truly scintillating script-writing.
I love watching the supporting cast members in Rick's "Cafe Americain" who have been indisputably reported as refugees who had actually fled Nazi-occupied Europe. When they sang "La Marseillaise," the tears in their eyes were the real thing. Pretty hard to top that, especially in a film made during the early days of WWII.
Unfortunately, the Epsteins were given another writing assignment halfway through pic, and Howard Koch was ordered to crank out the melodramatic denouement of the yet unfinished script, written just days ahead of the actual shoot.
Madeleine LeBeau (featured in a brief dalliance with Bogart's Rick in pic) is easily the sexiest woman in pic (at 17 years of age, a recent French refugee herself, and quintessentially nubile). She genuinely cries like a baby as she sings her French national anthem. Few actresses ever upstaged the polished super-star Ingrid Bergman, with the extreme close-ups of her carefully posed, glowing, porcelain complexion lighting up any theater screening pic. But the slinky, succulent, petit morceau LeBeau (who was the one player, besides Claude Rains, who exuded any genuine sexual energy in pic) still managed to steal the limelight in her small, supporting role.
Bogart struts and grunts through pic with the same tough guy persona he uses in every gangster film he's ever been in. Imagine instead the witty and urbane Dick Powell (who breathed life into the very same "Phillip Marlowe" character in "Murder, My Sweet" that Bogart couldn't even touch in his portrayal of that private-eye in "The Big Sleep") as Rick, instead of the grumpy, unappealing Bogart. Powell was a former song-and-dance man who seamlessly transitioned over to dramatic roles, and he would have given a nuanced, heartfelt perf to the character of Rick. Perhaps he was unavailable, but he's the actor I would have cast as Rick.
Ingrid Bergman herself seems like she hasn't the slightest sexual interest in the aging, sawed-off Bogart. She also mailed in her scenes with her husband Paul Henreid, who acts as stiff as a board with Bergman, though at 6' 3" Henreid at least didn't have to stand on an "Apple Box" (derisively known in The Biz as "The Man-Maker" in snarky filmmaking jargon) like the 5' 8" Bogart was forced to use in order to match the the height of the towering Swede Bergman's 5' 10" (without heels) stature. Bergman, obviously a sophisticated, blase', 30ish-looking woman, looks so far out of Bogart's league that it's almost laughable. Cary Grant was the only male lead to really ignite an on-screen chemistry in his roles with The Viking Queen.
Predictably, the stuffy, classically-trained, over-rehearsed Bergman didn't have a clue on how to umpire Claude Rains' constant flirtations with her. Improv was never Bergman's strong suit. The ever-playful Rains stole every scene with Bergman, who turned out to be an odd, dour casting choice indeed for the role of the young, naive woman who was Bogart's young Paris squeeze.
Worst of all, Bergman's crassly imperious and unmistakably condescending air in her dialogue with Sam, Bogart's black piano player, revealed her revoltingly supercilious sense of Nordic superiority.
The fiery, spectacular Parisienne Madeleine LeBeau would have been a much more believable and tantalizing choice for the "impressionable young girl" that the worldly, independent Scandinavian Bergman ridiculously claimed to be when she fell for and married Henreid's heroic resistance-fighter character.
If only the story had flashbacked to Bogart in his earlier Paris romance with the mouthwatering, patently underage LeBeau, maybe it would have infused pic with the Hays Code-busting, steamy sexual energy that it needed to propel it above its predictable, corny, propaganda-infused climax. Kind of like what Bogart actually did in his real life, when he gave his much older wife Mayo Methot the heave-ho to marry the beautiful 19 year-old Hollywood MAW ("Model-Actress-Whatever") named Lauren Bacall, who was an eye-popping twenty-five years his junior (they were enviously referred to in 1940s Tinseltown as "Bogey & Baby"). Life imitates art.
"We'll always have Paris," Bogart pontificates to Bergman as he stoically gives her up to Henreid in the last scene, who then both escape Casablanca to Lisbon by plane. Seriously?! Even a whiskey-soaked, man's-man like Rick would have shot Henreid's character dead in the blink of an eye to hang on to the stunning - if icy and unapproachable - Bergman.
The saccharine Hollywood Ending with Bogart walking off with Claude Rains with their backs to us into the fog (actually a darkened sound stage at Warner Brothers Culver City lot), with Rains offering to use the 10,000 francs he lost in a bet with Bogart to get them both to safety of the Free French garrison at Brazzaville, has become the most quoted line in pic: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." That mawkish, syrupy line - written by none other than pic's producer Hal B. Wallis himself - ran neck-and-neck for the final looped line in pic with the much more cynical, and entertaining, alternative line that he wrote: "Louis, I always knew that you had a little larceny in your heart," but that line was finally considered too unpatriotic for a wartime propaganda pic.