Casablanca

To be shown: 24 September 2001
Sponsored and introduced by Harry Patterson
Best film - 55th season

USA 1942
102 minutes
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Leading players - Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid.

Synopsis

What on earth is there left to say about what many people consider to be the best film ever made?

Bogart, Bergman, Henreid, Claude Rains and a host of superb character actors, a script of wit, grace, charm, melodrama that dazzles the mind.

The whole thing is, of course, surrounded by myth. For example the script, produced, so we are told, on virtually a day-to-day basis so that the writers were producing what was needed for shooting tomorrow. A common story in the film world. I'd like to believe it because I've done it myself, but, alas, with nothing like the same dark wit.

The exchanges between Bogart and Claude Rains are truly classic. "Why did you come to Casablanca? I like to think you killed a man, it's the romantic in me." "I came to Casablanca to take the waters." "But we're in the desert." "I was misinformed."

Essentially a great love story. Bergman never better although in earlier years she confessed that she thought it just a thriller and never took it seriously. She was actually giving a better performance than she did in later and more pretentious films. One could say the same of Paul Henreid, unforgettable as he conducts the crowd in singing the Marseillaise, drowning out Conrad Veidt and the Nazis.

Casablanca made Bogart, in spite of an excellent and long lasting record in films, one of the biggest stars of his times. The Casablanca myth has it that originally, Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan and Dennis Morgan were cast. The truth is that a great Hollywood star, George Raft, turned the part down. He also turned down The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra, showing a total lack of insight into the possibilities of three fabulous parts and Humphrey Bogart played all of them.

So, as Claude Rains says whenever there's a crisis: Round up the usual suspects and the sentence, of course, is to watch this wonderful movie again.