Masterpiece of understatement

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2004)

Without doubt the cast is incomparable, but even so the script is the real star of Casablanca. Everyone has a sob story to tell (except for the Nazis who have given people the material for their own sob stories), but the movie would sink into the most depressing experience possible if the script didn't cut off the sob stories before people started to show self-pity. The only self-pitying character is Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) -- who doesn't realize how lucky he is to be an American.
Such is the genius of this movie, the explanation of its location in both the AFI's "100 Best Films" and IMDb voters' choice of it -- both in the Top 10. Today it is impossible to imagine anyone not delving into one's own abyss of hurt feelings under such circumstances. Casablanca in 1941 is Purgatory; occupied Europe is Hell, even if it is a man-made Inferno, and the Nazis intend to make their Hell more fearsome than any that Dante thought up.
Casablanca succeeds because it forces us to feel empathy for the victims of nazism -- people who have been sent into concentration camps, rich people who have become paupers because the Nazis confiscated their fortunes, people displaced. We are left to our own devices to imagine what Rick Blaine and Ilse Lund (Bergman) did in Paris.
We find comic elements, but the comic scenes underscore the desperation that people feel, as in the pickpocket vignette; as the pickpocket fleeces a patron of Rick's bar, the pickpocket gives a smarmy lecture "there are vipers, vipers...", and the Dutch banker feels his pockets. Happiness is entirely to be found in nostalgia for better days, or hope for the future for a restoration of things as they were before the war. Who can forget the scene in which the Germans sing "Die Wacht am Rhein" (actually, an innocuous patriotic song from the 19th century), only to hear almost everyone else break into a rousing "Marseillaise", with the resolution of the situation with the police prefect ordering the bar closed for "gambling", the police prefect collecting his winnings.
Casablanca relates one moment in time -- arguably the most desperate moment in time for refugees from the Hell of nazi Germany and its empire, when Britain stood alone or when Russia seemed on the brink of collapse, before the United States was in the war and sealed the fate of nazi Germany, and before the fullest horrors of nazism became known.
This is an absolute must see. A basic rule for any collection: it is far better to have one great movie than five "fair" ones, and forget the bad ones altogether.