Short Take: Casablanca

In some ways, Casablanca is the most confoundingly great movie of all. On the surface, it doesn't appear to be anything special. It's a wartime melodrama set in 1941 Morocco, when the place was semi-controlled by the Nazi-collaborating French Vichy government. An expatriate-American nightclub owner (Humphrey Bogart) has to decide whether to help a Czech resistance leader (Paul Henreid) and his wife (Ingrid Bergman) escape the city and the Nazis. The nightclub owner's decision is complicated by his bitterness over a past affair with the wife, whom he still considers his one true love. The screenplay, credited to Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, is well-structured, but the plotting isn't especially clever. While the filmmaking is skillful and lively, director Michael Curtiz doesn't have any particularly artful moments. The acting is solid, though largely conventional. It's no surprise that accounts of the film's production say no one involved thought the project was anything out of the ordinary. But a truism of the arts is that greatness often blindsides its makers. Casablanca, without meaning to, tapped into the 20th-century cultural zeitgeist more powerfully than perhaps any other film. The Bogart character fuses alienation--the major theme of 20th-century art and literature--with old-fashioned moral ideals to create a modern style of romantic heroism. The film acknowledges society is unjust, that people are unfairly victimized by circumstance, and that the temptation to turn inward is both powerful and understandable. But it also treats ideals as a source of redemption, and the most admirable quality is the savviness needed, in the face of corruption, to do the right thing. Humphrey Bogart didn't have a broad range as an actor. But this film did the most to make him Hollywood's greatest star. It's because his screen persona so completely embodied the world-weariness, intelligence, and determination needed for the film's new heroic paradigm. Bogart makes a viewer feel the nightclub owner's pain, but there's no doubt of how formidable the man is when it matters. Other key elements, such as Ingrid Bergman's lovely presence, and the nostalgic melancholy of the "As Time Goes By" theme song, all enhance a viewer's sense of the fellow's dilemmas. The film also has its lighter side. It draws a clear distinction between vice and evil, and Claude Rains' often comic performance as the police chief makes vice very entertaining indeed. A number of the script's famous lines--it has as many as one of the best Shakespeare plays--score off the chief's crookedness. The cast also includes Dooley Wilson, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Marcel Dalio, and Madeleine LeBeau. Max Steiner contributed the music, although "As Time Goes By" was composed by Herman Hupfeld. The cinematography is by Arthur Edeson. The script was based on the unproduced play Everyone Comes to Rick's, by Murray Burnett and Joan Allison.