Play the "Marseillaise."... Play it!

Rating: 10/10 (16 February 2012)

Some films are greater than the sum of their parts. According to Hollywood lore, no one who was involved in the making of CASABLANCA, one of the most iconic of American films, had the slightest idea that they were making anything more than a run-of-the-mill programmer. True, it was an A-list programmer, with A-list stars, an A-list director, and the kind of ensemble of well-known and beloved character actors filling out the supporting cast that Warner Bros fans had come to love and expect.
Yet despite all this, for most of the personnel involved it was business as usual; Ingrid Bergman remarked in her autobiography that the script was being written as they went along, and it was not until late in the shooting schedule that she finally knew who she would end up with, which she claimed made it confusing because she did not know from one day to another who she was supposed to be in love with.
Seventy years later, it seems remarkable to think that the people making this stunning film didn't realize what they had. For the finished product is one of those films that approaches perfection in the same way GONE WITH THE WIND and CITIZEN KANE did.
By now, I think everyone knows the bare bones of the story, which revolves around Rick's Café Américain, a nightclub and (illicit) casino in unoccupied French Morocco run by Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and involves the efforts of people trying to get exit visas to go to Lisbon, and on to the United States.
Casablanca is still unoccupied, but that does not mean the Nazis are not milling around, most notably one Major Heinrich Strasser (Conrad Veidt in his final film). And they are most interested in one recent arrival: resistance fighter Victor Laszlo, an escapee from a concentration camp hoping to get out of Casablanca one step ahead of the Nazis. Traveling with him is Miss Ilsa Lund (Bergman), whom we later discover is Laszlo's wife and who was briefly Rick's lover in Paris when she thought her husband was dead.
I don't really need to describe it any more. This is one of those films that is simply a joy to watch no matter how many times one sees it: it is beautifully shot in crisp black-and white, Michael Curtiz's direction is, as always, impeccable, and the only way to describe the cast is "heaven sent;" everyone fits their roles so perfectly that the movie soars like the airplane to Lisbon that represents escape from terror and freedom in the New World.
Bogart and Henreid have seldom been better; Bogart did not often get to show his softer side, but when he did, he showed what a great actor he really was. Henreid plays a man who is a legend throughout Europe, but he makes him completely human. And Bergman is sublime as always; her performance turned out to be pitch-perfect, and I can't decide between this film and NOTORIOUS, but she has seldom been more beautiful than she is here.
Surprisingly, this film does not seem to date. It is as fresh to me today as it was when I first saw it on the Late Show about forty years ago. I guess the greatest works of art are truly eternal.