‘Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine...’
I have kind of seen Casablanca before. My dad and I watched at least an hour of it one Christmas Day, but as the holiday season was often a time for hard drinking in the Johnson household, I couldn’t hand-on-heart claim to have properly seen Casablanca until now. I know about it of course. It’s one of those films that floats around in the cinematic ether. It’s everywhere and nowhere. If a movie is big enough to be parodied by The Simpsons then you know it is pretty damn big indeed. So yes, while I hadn’t sat and watched all of Casablanca I knew what to expect. And yet, it was still a magical experience…
Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) – surely the best saloon owner in movie history – must choose between his heart or the soul of the nation. On the one hand he could help his former lover Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) escape occupied Morocco with her new husband, on the other he could try and win back Ilsa for himself. It is this moral quandary that sits right at the heart of Casablanca.
Widely considered to be one of the best films ever made, Casablanca is one of those movies where every frame screams perfection. Rick’s Place is beautifully rendered and Bogart himself delivers surely one of the all time great performances as the protagonist and centre of the movie. It helps that he has some of the most iconic dialogue in cinema history to work with, but in the hands of a lesser actor, it could so easily have come across as hammy and insincere.
Bogart also has a wonderful cast around him with Bergman perfectly capturing that feeling of tortured yearning that defines Ilsa while a rotating cast of suave barflys parade around Rick’s on both sides of the war effort.
Prolific director Michael Curtiz produced many, many films, both before and after Casablanca, but he would never come close to recreating what he conjured up here. A true titan of American cinema.