One of Hollywood's best, Bogart's second-best performance (SPOILERS)

Rating: 10/10 (1 July 2004)

This is a great movie, and one of the best examples of the Golden Age. The movie works not only because of a great script, great cast, and great minimalist direction, but because it provides an excellent sense of time and place. Few movies are so directly linked to the time in which they were made. In 1942 the outcome of the war was a question mark, as was the Nazi threat. This movie was made when nobody was sure who would win, and it shows. The desperation of the characters, from Rick himself to bit parts that receive only five seconds of screen time, comes across perfectly without being over-stated or glossed over to give the love triangle more screen time. In fact, forget the love triangle, the real struggle in this movie is in Rick (though as this movie's script is so heavily analyzed by every film school in the country, I'm probably not saying anything new).
Few major Hollywood productions have such human characters. Nobody in this movie is an archetype, they are all flawed, they make mistakes, and most importantly they will all redeem themselves in some way (except for the Nazis, who would certainly not be shown redeeming themselves in a war-time movie). Sydney Greenstreet is a criminal, and proud of it, yet he decides to give Ilsa and Victor some helpful information, admitting that he doesn't see how it helps him. Claude Rains is a despicable pig who uses his authority to get sexual favors from desperate women, and he too is proud of this, yet at the end he also redeems himself.
Some people have said that this movie has the best supporting cast in history, and they may be right. The Bulgarian girl, Rick's staff, Peter Lorre, Victor Laszlo, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Sam, and the Nazi who looks like Porky Pig with a monocle. I said in the header that this is Bogart's second-best performance, and the first would be Treasure of the Sierra Madre (you saw that coming, I'm sure).
Unfortunately a lot of the dramatic impact of this movie, especially the finale, will be ruined for many younger viewers like myself, because it is so endlessly quoted and imitated in other movies, books, tv shows, etc. This is a darn shame. Nevertheless, I gave this movie a 10/10.