of all the gin joints in the pictures...

Rating: 10/10 (11 March 2015)

Hell yeah. I'm not even sure why I put this off for so long, maybe just projecting my fear of failure onto cinema history? I can count the number of movies that lived up to their reputations on one and a half hands, I'm sure, but this is one of them. Desert played for night even at day, Bogart the beautiful and Bergman the brusque, convoluted and borderline irrelevant WWII backdrop that buoys the main action... I love movies that can blend genres and feelings seamlessly, and this one is what -- romance, noir, thriller, comedy, war movie? It plays like the flipside to any big tentpole movie about the war, like we are privy to a dimly lit, far more interesting corner of a far more boring action movie. Kind of shocked I dug it so much!