Wartime Drama, Intrigue, Romance in Exotica.

Rating: 5/10 (2 September 2009)

Since no one reading these comments knows the plot, I'll outline it. Loner Humphrey Bogart runs a shady saloon and gambling house in French Morocco in 1942. The Nazis are closing in. The region is under the government of the French puppet government and is represented by Claude Raines. Bogart is wary of relationships. "I stick my neck out for nobody." Into his gin joint walks an old girl friend, Ingrid Bergman, and her husband. They're still in love but Bergman is bonded to her idealistic husband, a resistance hero and concentration camp escapee. Bogart is distraught.
A flashback reveals that they were lovers in Paris before it was occupied by the Germans. They kiss often on the screen and it's even suggested that they had premarital intercourse. Bergman finds out that her husband is still alive and deserts Bogart without explanation. The rebuff leaves him shocked -- shocked!
Back in the present, in Rick's café in Casablanca, it's revealed that Bogart has two unimpeachable passes out of Casablanca, which Bergman attempts to get from him, for use by her and her hero husband, at the point of a gun. But she can't shoot Bogart. Instead, she collapses in his arms. The scene dissolves. When the next scene fades in they are standing apart and conversing. I suspect another illicit interlude has taken place.
In the end, good prevails. Bogart and Bergman sacrifice their love for the greater good.
It's practically an icon of 1940s Hollywood. It has a great cast -- Bogart, Bergman, Cuddles Sakal, Claude Raines, Greenstreet and Lorre from "The Maltese Falcon," Paul Henreid, John Qualen, Leonid Kinsky, Conrad Veidt from Fritz Lang's "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari." It was probably the high point of Michael Curtiz's career. And it's been applauded by fans from all over the world for almost seventy years.
And it's not bad, either. It's just that, to the extent that it eludes my aesthetic apparatus, I guess it's because I find it no more than an interesting but strictly routine tale of the nasty Nazis, the ambiguous French, the heroic European resistance, and the cynical and embittered American who converts to the values of the Free World at the end. Bogart was to play similar roles for the rest of his career. (Cf., "Key Largo.")
The very features of the film that are so consistently pointed to as its greatest assets I find kind of corny. Everybody quotes tag lines. "The problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." "Round up the usual suspects." "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." I remember every detail of Paris. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue."
Then there's the scene in which the Free French outsing the Germans. Is that cannon fire or is it myself I hear snoring? The movie is okay for what it purports to be, a strictly commercial, patriotic effort from Warner Brothers. There's nothing to indicate the slapdash quality of the shooting itself. (At one point, Bogart had a scene in which he stood on a balcony nodding at something below, without knowing what the something was supposed to be.)
I watch it more out of a sense of duty than any magnetic attraction towards an irresistible film. The schmaltz is frankly irritating. I wince, watching the tears roll down Bergman's gorgeous face, hearing Bogart's repeated, "Here's looking at you kid." It would be nice to think that there was more going on than what we see and hear on the surface. Somewhere between the rainy train station in Paris and the colorful desert resorts of Casablanca, couldn't Bogart have come out of the closet? Maybe he and Claude Raines were jealous of one another? Couldn't Bogart have sent Bergman off with her husband because he was more in love with his collection of ladies' undergarments? He found the local goat herds more inspiring?
Anything?