There is a particular problem with reviewing Casablanca, which is that nearly everyone arrives already knowing the lines. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “Round up the usual suspects.” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” A film this quoted risks becoming a collection of greeting cards, admired in pieces and never watched whole. So the useful question is not whether it is a classic. It is whether the thing still works as a story when you sit down and watch it from the first frame, and the answer, somewhat to the surprise of anyone who expects a museum piece, is that it plays like a well oiled thriller with a broken heart in the middle.
Casablanca at a Glance
| Premiere | November 26, 1942, New York; general US release January 23, 1943 |
|---|---|
| Director | Michael Curtiz |
| Screenplay | Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch |
| Based on | The unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison |
| Starring | Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Dooley Wilson |
| Producer | Hal B. Wallis for Warner Bros. |
| Music | Max Steiner |
| Runtime | 102 minutes |
| Academy Awards | Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay |
| National Film Registry | Inducted in 1989, in the first class of 25 films |
A Studio Picture That Forgot to Be Ordinary
Casablanca was not made as a masterpiece. It was one of dozens of pictures Warner Bros. turned out that year, assembled by a contract director, a team of writers rewriting as they shot, and a cast who by most accounts did not know how the story would end. That is usually offered as a charming bit of trivia. It is more useful as a key to why the film feels the way it does. There is no sense of a single guiding vision pressing on every scene. Instead there is the confidence of a studio machine at the top of its game, where every department, from Max Steiner’s music to the set dressing of Rick’s Café Américain, knows exactly what it is doing.
Michael Curtiz directs like a man who trusts his crew and his actors and has no time to waste. The opening stretch is a small miracle of exposition: a map, a refugee trail, a murder, a round up, a plane in the sky that everyone watches with longing, all in a few minutes. By the time Bogart is on screen, you understand the city as a waiting room, full of people who have run out of everything except hope and money, and who are spending both at Rick’s.
Bogart, Bergman, and a Love Story Told in Retreat
Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine is introduced as a man who sticks his neck out for nobody, and the film’s structure is simply the slow, reluctant process of that neck coming back out. What Bogart understands is that Rick’s cynicism is a wound, not a philosophy. He plays the bitterness dry and the tenderness rare, so that the few moments where the mask slips, a drink poured too fast, a line delivered half a beat late, carry enormous weight.
Ingrid Bergman has the harder part, and she is extraordinary in it. Ilsa is caught between two men and two obligations, and the script, famously unsettled during production, gives her very little to explain herself with. Bergman fills the gaps with her face. She plays a woman who is not sure which of her feelings she is allowed to act on, and that uncertainty, which could have made the character vague, makes her the most human person in the film.
The flashback to Paris is the film’s one sentimental indulgence, and it is kept short for good reason. The romance in Casablanca is not really about the past. It is about what two people choose to do with a love that the world has made inconvenient, and the best scenes between Bogart and Bergman are scenes of restraint, not passion.
The Supporting Cast Is the Secret Weapon
Ask anyone who loves this film and they will eventually start talking about Claude Rains. His Captain Renault is a corrupt, charming, entirely unprincipled police chief who treats the war as a series of transactions, and Rains plays him with such lightness that he steals nearly every scene he is in. The famous line about being shocked to find gambling in the establishment, delivered as he pockets his winnings, is the film’s funniest moment and also its sharpest joke about complicity.
Around him the bench is stacked. Peter Lorre’s frantic Ugarte, Sydney Greenstreet’s genial Ferrari, Conrad Veidt’s icy Strasser and Dooley Wilson’s Sam, whose “As Time Goes By” becomes the film’s emotional thread, all give the city a texture that no amount of set design could supply. Paul Henreid, as the resistance leader Victor Laszlo, has the thankless role of being noble, and he plays it with dignity, even if the film is never quite as interested in him as it is in Rick.
Where It Does Not Hold
Our reservation is with Laszlo, and through him with the film’s politics. Casablanca is a war picture made in the middle of a war, and its sympathies are never in doubt. But its idea of resistance is almost entirely symbolic. Laszlo is a hero because we are told he is one, and his defining moment, leading the café in “La Marseillaise” to drown out the German officers, is stirring precisely because it is a song rather than an act. The film asks us to believe that his cause justifies everything Rick gives up, yet it never lets us see what that cause costs or what it demands, beyond good posture.
There is also the matter of the plot mechanics. The letters of transit, the device on which the whole story turns, make very little sense on reflection, and the final act depends on a string of coincidences and convenient decisions that a stricter script would have tightened. None of this sinks the film. It does mean that Casablanca survives on character and atmosphere rather than on logic, and that viewers expecting a watertight thriller will notice the seams.
The Ending, Reconsidered
Much has been written about the final scene at the airport, and most of it is deserved. What makes it land is not the self sacrifice, which has been done in a thousand films, but the tone. Rick does not give a grand speech about duty. He gives a practical, almost weary explanation, and then turns the moment into a joke with Renault. The film ends not on romance but on friendship and on a decision to go back into the world. It is a remarkably unsentimental conclusion to a film that is often remembered as the height of screen sentiment.
The Verdict
Casablanca is not a perfect film, and its most devoted admirers do it no favors by pretending otherwise. Its politics are thin, its plot is held together with tape, and its hero is noble mainly by contrast with the men around him. But it has something rarer than perfection: a sense of life, of a real city full of real desperation, and a love story told by people who understand that the most romantic thing two characters can do is let each other go. Watch it for Bogart and Bergman, stay for Claude Rains, and notice how rarely a film of its age feels this quick on its feet.
