Casablanca (1942)

1942, Warner Bros. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Dooley Wilson.

From a National Catholic Register review

By Steven D. Greydanus

The world’s favorite Hollywood love story is all the more romantic because it doesn’t exalt romantic love above all. Made under a studio system that cranked out a film a week, Casablanca just happened to be one film in which everything came together with magical rightness — the wittily cynical dialogue, spare, effective storytelling, a vivid sense of time and place, sharply drawn characters, a first-rate cast, great cinematography and score, and classic wartime melodrama that hasn’t lost a thing as time goes by.

Bogey is at his best as Rick, an American opportunist in 1940 French Morocco with a gruffly cynical exterior that belies his wary idealism and wounded heart. Ingrid Bergman is luminous as Ilsa, who arrives in Casablanca with resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) but clearly has a history with Rick. Cynicism and self-interest contend with idealism and self-sacrifice as Rick and Ilsa’s past weighs against the world’s future.

When was the last time you saw a love story in which the hero’s rival is admirable and heroic, a melodrama in which the outcome seems genuinely in doubt (because it was, even as the film was shot), a noir-like tale of corruption and cynicism in which every major character, however shady, redeems himself in some way? "Each of us has a destiny, for good or evil," says Laszlo. Later, someone observes that "Love… has triumphed over virtue" — but he’s wrong. The problems of three little people may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but they can sure make for a great film.

Some menace and gunplay; oblique sexual references and depiction of womanizing.