Rick sticks his neck out for no one

Rating: 9/10 (5 August 2009)

This is the near-pinnacle of classic film.
I first saw Bogart in "The African Queen", and was very interested in his other roles.
Most of the movie plays out in a café. "Rick's American Cafe" is as classic and memorable of a setting as perhaps the library in The Breakfast Club or the resteraunt in My Dinner With Andre. Me and my fiancée have even gone to the extremes of emulating/replicating Rick's Cafe in the Sims games.
This place is a little piece of glamor and refuge away from the troubled north-African continent. People flock to Casablanca to get hooked up with transport to the USA, most of them escaping WW2 ravaged Europe. It's a cultural epicenter. The Nazis understand the town's significance and use it to exercise their influence on the region. They work together with the local French authority to maintain the flow of people (more notably, money) through this port to the western world.
Things go a little haywire when a wanted Czech resistance leader decides to show up at Rick's café. With this resistance leader, is the woman Rick has been drowning himself in booze over for years. He becomes drawn to her, and struggles with the task of sticking his neck out for her (and her friend, who has the Nazis on his trail).
That's pretty much it.
In-between all of the plot twists and sparkly-stuff, there's a few characters you actually care about. There's a setting as classic and campy as only this period of cinema could provide. Bogart is the man, he's one of the biggest on screen bad-asses I've seen in awhile.