A film with some plot holes, but okay entertainment.

Rating: 4/10 (17 September 2016)

I'm sure I'll get voted down for this review, but oh well.
Here's the reason; as pointed out in the commentary by the late great film critic Roger Ebert, what does anyone need with "letters of transit" to get out of Vichy / Nazi occupied Morocco? Just hijack a vehicle of some kind and get the hell out of there. How come nobody thought of that?
As I sat through the entire movie many many years ago I kept wondering why Boggie didn't whip out his gun and just force some cabbie to take him and Garbo out of the nation ... south along the African Coast to some sleepy village and wait out the war, or at least long enough to book passage to the states for the both of them. But then again I attended SF State and not USC nor UCLA, so what the heck do I know?
But the whole films like that. It's a reflection on a romance gone sour by the fact one of the parties, all those years, had a romantic obligation to someone else. So the whole film boils down to how much bitterness is in the lead character, and does he let that win out over "the greater good" to fight fascism. That's pretty much the film in a nut shell.
Does it work? Well, again the plot holes arise. If this film had been true to form, then the lead character might have been thrown in the slammer or just shot on the spot without the formality of an arrest. And the woman and her husband detained without question and given to the nazi soldiers. I mean, this is war. Right?
But, for some strange reason there's this whole thing about dealing with formalities of getting papers and rekindling old flames for the sake of "the greater good". I think a better script would have been a bit more gritty, forgone the whole parading of male egos to impress the female audience, and just let it be the shoot-em-up film that it was probably in its first draft, because otherwise this makes all parties, even the allies, look like complete idiots.
I mean, come on, there's an enemy of the state who's trying to escape. You know his name, what he looks like, where he's staying, who his girlfriend is and everything else. You've got some troops there and the Vichy government operates at your blessing. Are you really going to just let that dude and his lady wait it out until he can get some passport saying he can leave? No. You wouldn't.
Would you throw your weight around town pretending not to notice them? Probably not. But again the film is engineered for a female sensibility. The female audience largely bought into the notion of needing a stamp of approval from an enemy power to leave. It's complete and total nonsense, but there you have it.
I don't get how and why this film was made, nor why it's called a classic, because if you think about it for a couple of seconds, then the whole thing should fall apart on its own premise.
Still, I suppose I should add that if you can suspend your disbelief (or even belief) for this thing, and you can buy into the whole plot to begin with, and then really wonder if Bogart's character is going to give a rat's backside about the plight of a couple of wanted people.
And, finally, I'm going to get dinged for this too, but the nazi military is not the only set of bad guys we've vanquished throughout our history. They're one of the most notorious, if not the most notorious we've ever come across, but if you look at other films about international conflict, you'll note a high degree of staging put into this film. And I think that should set the intelligent viewer to wondering about this film's merits in the first place.
Watch at your own risk.