fast paced, keeps you guessing, most quotable

Rating: 10/10 (29 May 2006)

Casablanca is among the most hyped movies of all time. The current generation of viewers who have never seen it will undoubtedly wonder what all the fuss is about. Could a movie that old really be that good? Typically in black-and-whites, the characters are stick-figures, the acting is stiff, the pace moves too slowly, the plot is predictable, the dialog is naive, the production is dated, and therefore the total package will be found lacking in excitement to today's generation. Casablanca has almost none of those traits.
Indeed, the plot of Casablanca is as thick, as multi-layered, as timeless as any movie or play ever written. "Shakespearean" comes to mind as an adjective. It has drama, comedy, romance, history, mystery, and you can't guess what will happen next, much less how it will end.
Also as in Shakespeare, the dialog of Casablanca is as quotable as it gets. One liners abound: "Here's looking at you, kid" -- is to movies what "To be or not to be" is to plays. And the best part is the one-liners come at you not once, twice, or three times, but repeatedly and frequently throughout the movie. Even the very last line is a memorable, quotable jewel for the ages.
But it's more than the quotability factor that makes the dialog great. It's smart. It's so smart that it still sounds "cool" by 2006 standards.
The acting in Casablanca, while stiffer that what the current generation sees in movies today, and the production, though Hollywood stage set, are good enough and convincing enough that it would be foolish to try to improve upon them by making a new version of the movie. The best that a modern production could do is borrow or steal from the original--parody it, even, to make something totally new--Indiana Jones being the prime example.
Reviewers often use such superlatives as "perfect" or "near perfect" when describing Casablanca. They are correct to do so. Anyone watching this movie who finds serious and major flaws, or who gives it a thumbs down, is just not grounded in reality. They must lack a panoramic sense of movie history. . . or just plain history. Concerning movie history, it is not fair to hold a movie made in the 1940s to the exact same standard as a movie made in 2006. For its time, it was as get as they came; and it stands the test of time.
Concerning just plain history, the viewer must have a basic understanding of World War II for the setting of Casablanca to make sense. One doesn't have to be super-knowledgeable about history, one just needs to understand that the Germans attacked France, the French government fell and then (under the name Vichy France) cooperated with the Nazis, but a strong French resistance continued to fight the Germans. Many people were dislocated by the war--some French, some Americans, some from every nationality. This film just happens to portray a few such characters--mostly regular Joe's and Jane's caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and thus stuck in the middle of nowhere in Morocco. Very believable from a historical perspective.
Viewers who don't understand this basic outline of history may not "get" the movie the first time (my wife, 42, a very smart, educated RN, but who just "don't know much about history," for example).
Casablanca is, to repeat, one of the most hyped movies of all time. But it lives up to the hype. The reason it gets such high marks from so many millions of viewers is, simply enough, it deserves them.