Good, not great

Rating: 6/10 (26 December 2008)

First, let's go with the performances of some of the leading characters, and let me start by stating that most of the characterizations of the acting abilities of the actors in this film, by critics, are often quite wrongheaded. Let us start with the three top billed actors, Humphrey Bogart as club owner Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman as his ex-lover Ilsa Lund, and Paul Henreid as Ilsa's husband, the Czechoslovakian Nazi Resistance outlaw, Victor Laszlo. Virtually all critiques of this trio leave Henreid as the odd man out, mainly because the film focuses on the love angle between Rick and Ilsa. But, from a purely technical standpoint, Henreid gives, by far, the best acting performance of the trio (and, it's not even close). Because it is the most restrained and understated, however, it usually gets dismissed as stiff acting, rather than good acting of an intentionally stiff character....one need only look at the cheesy scene in the bar, where Victor hears the Nazis singing their song, Die Wacht Am Rhein, and dares to get the band to play La Marseillaise, then look in Victor's eyes, to see that, far from what critics claim, Victor is a man of great passion and principles from the get go, and this break from his usual restraint gains in power precisely because it is a break, but one that seems wholly natural for a man who has been frustrated for the bulk of his scenes in the film, and then feels he is having his face rubbed in it. While the political implications of the scene have lost their resonance (as do most blatantly political gestures in art), Henreid's volcanically restrained performance in that scene has not. And, as an asides, compare that scene with a similar scene toward the ends of the aforementioned Paths Of Glory, where a captured German girl is put on stage, in front of drunken French soldiers seemingly willing to ravage her, until she starts singing a plaintive German tune of a soldier and his lost love. The drunk soldiers quiet down, and eventually start humming along with the 'enemy,' and slowly show that they have not been totally inured by carnage. A comparison of these two scenes (their structure and placement) neatly and clearly shows why Casablanca is mere entertainment, while Paths Of Glory is great art. Simply stated, without the character (in his physical being and internal composition) of Victor Laszlo, Casablanca does not even reach being a good prose melodrama.
Now, contrast Henreid's Victor with Bogart's Rick. Rick is rather one dimensional, despite the film's early evocations of depth. His attraction to Ilsa seems quite superficial; after all, in the flashback scenes in Paris, and even those in Casablanca, does he ever speak of higher purpose? Despite some wittier lines....is Rick Blaine sufficiently different from the Sam Spade Bogart essayed in The Maltese Falcon, or any of the rather stolid thugs he played throughout the 1930s? No.
That brings me to the last and least of the trio of star performances: Ingrid Bergman's rather mediocre portrayal of Ilsa Lund. First, it's not a bad performance, but it's nowhere near great. One need only look at contemporaneous performances by a Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, or even Judy Garland, to see how much Bergman pales in contrast. And, it's rather apparent that Ilsa really loves Victor, not Rick, because anyone who's ever really been in love knows that she would have stayed with Rick, no matter.
But the biggest thing that prevents the film from greatness is that it simply plumbs no depths, it simply has no great themes. There is nothing in the film that is so overwhelmingly great, technically or performance-wise, that can put it in a class with many of the other highly praised great films of the past. Seen next to Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai, La Dolce Vita, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, Casablanca comes up short, way short.
On the plus side, Casablanca is quite a modern film, in terms of pacing (and in some aspects of editing), for within the first ten or twelve minutes, you feel as if you know these archetypal characters (for good or ill), as if you'd already had a full movie's worth of them under your belt, and this is part of the reason why the film sucks you in to its vortex, and gets better, subjectively, as it goes on, even if, objectively, it's a fairly static film, in terms of plotting.
Film critic Andrew Sarris claimed that Casablanca was, 'the most decisive exception to the auteur theory,' but he was wrong, and wrong for several reasons. First, auteur theory generally applies toward films or filmmakers that are great, and while Casablanca has been claimed as great, no one has ever made that claim for Curtiz. Secondly, greatness is part and parcel of a vision, and vision is, almost by definition, a property only a singular person can have, not a group; thus Sarris's very admission that Casablanca had more than one 'auteur' makes it also outside the scope of auteur theory, by definition, not an exception to the theory....the film lacks vision, and is a stylistic and narrative hodgepodge. Still, it does entertain, and is an interesting piece of Americana. Also, the lower the expectations you have of the film, the more entertaining it seems. Ah, the flicker of illusion!