Michael Curtiz’s classic, Casablanca, was released by the Warner Bros. studio in 1943 following its premiere in the previous year. Despite the passage of eight decades, it is remarkably fresh. I watched it on the Turner Classic Movies television channel, and it remains as vital and engaging as it was when I last saw it in the 1990s.
A romantic drama set in the Moroccan city of Casablanca during a perilous period in World War II, it stars Humphrey Bogart as an American expatriate whose hardboiled exterior conceals a caring and sentimental soul. His co-star, the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, plays his mesmerizing love interest.
Previously lovers in Paris, they meet by chance in Morocco, a French colony awash with European refugees desperately seeking visas for a safe haven in the United States. Casablanca, an exotic North African city rife with intrigue, is crawling with shysters ready to lend a helping hand if the price is right.
The movie was filmed on a lot in California, but to the average viewer this is Casablanca incarnate, replete with crowded bazaars and filled with shoppers, thieves and con artists.
Cast into this milieu are, among others, Rick Blaine (Bogart), the owner of Rick’s Cafe Americain, and Ilse Lund (Bergman), a refuge he knew in Paris before the German army conquered it in 1940.
Clad in an immaculate white tuxedo and a black bow tie, with a cigarette usually dangling from his lips, Rick is rootless, mysterious and aloof. His only friend seems be Sam (Dooley Wilson), the African American pianist/singer who performs in Rick’s smoky, noisy cafe. One of the songs Sam belts out in a baleful tone, As Time Goes By, is memorable. Max Steiner’s thematic musical score is evocative.
Rick’s place, frequented by an eclectic mix of Moroccans and foreigners, is where visas and German letters of transit are bought and sold. One of the shady dealers dabbling in this illicit trade is Ugarte (the inimitable Peter Lorre), who leaves two letters of transit with Rick before he’s written out of the script.
Rick, whose “health” supposedly brought him to Casablanca, seems to be above the fray. Decidedly neutral insofar as his politics are concerned, he sticks out his neck for nobody. But to Louis Renault (Claude Rains), the hopelessly corrupt French police chief whose views blow with the wind, Rick is really a sentimentalist with a heart of gold.
As we gradually learn, Rick is on the right side of history. He ran guns in Ethiopia in support of rebels fighting fascist Italy. And he sided with the Loyalists battling pro-German nationalists during the Spanish civil war.
Ably directed by Curtis, the film revolves around Rick and Ilse, whom Bogart and Bergman portray magnificently, particularly in revealing closeups singling out a range of emotions from contentment to anguish.
Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), Ilse’s soulful companion, is another major character. A leader of the Czech underground, he was an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. He and Ilse hope to escape from Morocco, but they are under the watchful eye of a calculating German army officer, Major Heinrich Strasser (Conrad Veidt, the German actor who fled Nazi Germany after his marriage to a Jew). Ilse, realizing the danger he may be in, says she is “afraid” for him.
At this critical juncture, in a flashback, the film briefly recounts Rick’s liaison with Ilse in Paris. In one episode, Rick addresses the much younger Ilse in affectionate terms. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” he says. They are supposed to leave Paris together as the Germans advance on the French capital, but are separated. Rick does not encounter her again until they bump into each other in Morocco.
Back in Casablanca, Strasser offers Laszlo letters of transit if he cooperates with Germany. As an anti-Nazi, he refuses. Renault, whose convictions are dependent on whims and circumstances, sides with Strasser and pressures Laszlo to cooperate.
Meanwhile, Strasser inflicts a financial blow on Rick after he permits the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, to be played in his cafe.
The plot grows more complex when Ilse admits she still loves Rick. In animated conversations, she explains why she did not join him when he left Paris with the Germans on his heels.
Since he has Ugarte’s letters of transit, Rick is tempted to flee Casablanca along with Ilse. But being a decent fellow, he decides otherwise and thereby establishes himself as a hero.
From start to finish, Casablanca is absorbing. Its smart dialogue, written by Julius and Philip Epstein, contributes to its appeal. Renaud’s cynical quip, “Round up the usual suspects,” resonates. Rick’s heart-felt comment, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” sticks in the mind.
Not surprisingly, Casablanca won a slew of awards, including Oscars for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay.
It richly deserves its status as one of the classics of American cinema.