1942 The premiere of the world’s greatest movie
The movie Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz, and starring Humphrey Bogart, opens in New York. Released to take advantage of the invasion of North Africa and buoyed by the Casablanca Conference of 1943, the film did well at the box office but it was not a smashing success. Only after the Second World War did it become a cult hit and viewed as a critical triumph.
The film, based on the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s, charts the dilemma of night-club owner Rick Blaine in French Morocco; he claims to stick his neck out for no one but will his good instincts and chivalry trump his love for another man’s wife?
The cast was superb. Everyone remembers the luminous Ingrid Bergman but there were two other radiant beauties involved with Rick: the lovely Yvonne (played by 19-year old French refugee Madeleine Lebeau who in real life was married to the actor who played he roulette croupier) and Annina, the Bulgarian newlywed (Joy Page). Claude Rains was never better than as corrupt Captain Louis Renault; Peter Lorre oiled his way on screen as the odious Ugarte (“You despise me, don’t you Rick?”); and Conrad Veidt (the highest-paid member of the cast) sneered as German Major Heinrich Strasser. Only Paul Henried underperformed as the wooden resistance leader Victor Lazlo. Dooley Wilson enchanted as the piano player Sam, singing “As Time Goes By” and “Knock on Wood”.
Consider these great lines:
Rick: Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.
Yvonne: Where were you last night? Rick: That’s so long ago, I don’t remember. Yvonne: Will I see you tonight? Rick: I never make plans that far ahead.
Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression was that he’s just another blundering American. Renault: We musn’t underestimate “American blundering”. I was with them when they “blundered” into Berlin in 1918.
Renault: I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a Senator’s wife? I like to think that you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.
Rick: It’s a combination of all three.
Renault: And what in Heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
Renault: Major Strasser has been shot… round up the usual suspects.
Roger Ebert claimed Casablanca was “probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane“. Leonard Maltin said it was the best loved of all Hollywood films. But clever people who talk loudly in restaurants had other ideas. Pauline Kael thought it was far from great, Umberto Eco thought it was mediocre, a “a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects” while the New Yorker deemed the film “pretty tolerable”. Ha!
I’m only a poor corrupt official!