Minor nitpick: It’s William Goldman, my dear, not “Goldin.” And now it’s your turn to curtsey… 
Ender, you started this thread stating that you didn’t necessarily see what all the fuss was about. Clearly, two pages of posts, later, some folks see that there is a lot of cause for fuss…
Bottom line, Casablanca is unquestionably held up to be one of the finest movies made in Hollywood, along with movies by Hitchcock, Wilder, Hawks, Ford and others in that era. Given its place in the canon, you can do a couple of things:
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Position your tastes based on your opinion of it and other movies. Some people just don’t like or get Citizen Kane or Sunset Blvd or Bringing Up Baby. I happen to think their nuts, but that is their choice. At least you have an idea of how you feel about older movies, and can talk with others like you did in this thread. This type of discussion is good.
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You can learn from the movie. Since it is so highly placed in the pantheon, maybe you need to assume that it is that good, and see it again and try to learn more about why. By my third viewing of Casablanca, I had gone from ho-hum, to believing it to be worth all the hype. YMMV, but with art held in that high regard, sometimes the investment is really worth it. (or sometimes you need to learn more about what was going on in the world and in art when the thing got famous - maybe things have changed, so the art is less impressive now, but its reputation lives on and knowing more about it is a good thing.)
my $.02
Also daring–for the time–is the homosexual subtext of the film. Once I heard about it, I re-watched the film, and Renault’s attraction to Rick jumps out at you. Renault flirts with Rick in their first scene together. He even goes as far as saying “If I were a woman, I’d be in love with Rick”. There are a number of other scenes in the film that point to a homosexual attraction between the two of them. And in this light, the final image of the two of them walking off together to start a new life makes for a very happy ending!
I’m sure jealousy is the reason Rick lets the guy win a roulette so that his wife doesn’t have to sleep with Louie.
I’m back! Yegads, with all the replies and the talking and the glavin and the yehey!
First, a clarification of sorts from my OP: I realized the cliches originated with Casablanca. That was sort of my point, in a roundabout way. At least two people didn’t get the joke, so I thought I’d clear that up. Ha ha. Wasn’t it funny? Sigh…
To those that didn’t think I didn’t appreciate the movie, I did. My joking of cliches was but an indicator of that. A mediocre movie just doesn’t invade pop culture with that many references to characters and lines.
Most of the dialog was sharp, the actors were great, and the relationships between them were believable. I did enjoy it on a number of levels. It’s just that the drama between the the two main characters, Humprey and Bergman, felt hollow to me.
It wasn’t just Bergman’s line of “you decide for me,” it was her overall character. She left without confrontation in Paris. She kept the secret hidden from her husband even after she met Rick again. She presented no underlying character for us to fall in love with, let alone a strong willed man like Rick. Seriously, other than her being Ingrid (which is enough for some of you, I know), what kind of depth did she have other than as a person whose past we purposely know nothing about, a person who is weak willed and unable to make the tough choice?
It finally seals together at the end when she still can’t make the choice. It falls upon Rick to make it for her, at great expense to himself both emotionally and, by almost getting shot, physically. You can say that she gave him the ability to make the choice himself, but I see it as a continuation of the character she’s been all along.
But that’s just the character. You can play a weak person strongly and I don’t think Bergman pulled it off. I didn’t buy her performance. YMMV.
My take: The thing about Ilsa is that she is having trouble deciding between love (Rick) and duty (Laszlo). In the end Rick pushes her towards accepting her duty, and tells Laszlo the little lie about her pretending to love him (Rick), even though the lie is transparent to all. This represents the ultimate sacrifice that they (and by extension everyone else) needed to make to help defeat evil.
SPOILER ALERT: On a side note, I’ve always thought that the movie version of the Russia House was a sort of anti-Casablanca in that Sean Connery chooses love over duty to country in the end.
Back when I was in college (late 80s), one of the Turner stations was going to play Casablanca. My friends and I (all rabid fans) scheduled the dorm lounge so we could have a movie night, dressed in period (or as close as we could fake) attire and settled in for the best movie ever with our martini shakers and upscale snack foods.
As soon as it started rolling we all came to the horrid realization that this was the bastardized version, and myself, my roommate and two of our friends rushed, jumped furniture, friends and each other to get to the TV and turn off the color, after which we had a lovely time all around.
I have never seen the colorized version, but sadly, I remember talking with some students of mine about films and I brought up Casablanca (my all time favorite film) - none of the students had seen it “because it’s in black and white.”
I still can’t decide if it would have been better for them to see the colorized version than never to see it at all - or hope that someday they would grow up, see the film in the original B&W and realize what they had been missing.
I very, very rarely will ever watch a film more than once, but I probably watch Casablanca on average 4 times a year. There is just something about it…
The market scene at the beginning is beautiful in color. It isn’t film noire like The Maltese Falcon, and as someone already said, you can turn the color down.
Regarding Rick: what would the actual legal status of Rick and Sam (both American citizens) be in French Morocco in 1940? Supposedly, they had valid residence papers, but Captain Renault seems to hint that Major Strasser has more power than he let on.
What WAS major Strasser doing in Casablanca anyway? surely he couldjust tell capt.Renault to arrest Lazlo! One of the best lines in the movie:
Capt. Renault: …“Major Strassers’ been shot…round up the usual suspects!”
I was looking to see if the Vichy had autonomy in Morocco, but Wow…they executed the guys after the War.
It’s just the passivity of the character that gets to me. Ilsa is never straightforward about anything, not to Rick, not to her husband. I can understand why she acts the way she does, but I don’t have to like it.
P.S. I am not a guy.
I truly love this film and my main problems aren’t with characters or story line.
It is the few oddities of history fact versus the fiction in this film. Of course being made in 1941 Hollywood perhaps didn’t realize how bad thing were in Europe.
Victor according to dialogue spent time in concentration camps and somehow was set free or escaped escaped. The dialogue seemed to indicate Lazlo was set free at one point. The makers had no idea that concentration camps for political prisoners (and especially those for “ethnic clensing”) were one way affairs. Political prisoners generally weren’t serving time they were being eliminated. Especially if the prisoner happens to be the leader of the (entire!!) European Underground.
The Idea that The German’s would defer to the Vichy authority seems just weird. As the Vichy government was basically a puppet state. They turned over prisoners freely and followed German orders without protest.
The Gestapo would have been handleing the capture and interrogation of Victor not military officers and they certainly would not have allowed Victor to be wandering freely once they identified him.
I love the film but those moments sometimes kick me out the fantasy.
Well, I don’t think that it was just for the sake of the movie, or even the “it’s Ingrid Bergman, and she’s the costar” effect. I do believe that you’re supposed to take it for granted, but not as a cop-out but for what it represents. In other words, I never saw Casablanca as a love story, but as a story about war and duty and making sacrifices.
When Rick says “We’ll always have Paris,” he’s not just talking about their being in love. He’s talking about a time when they could be in love, when they had the freedom to be with each other without any obligations. It’s not so important how they fell in love with each other, but why she left. And the Ilsa you see in the move is not the same person he fell in love with. I didn’t see her as weak, but as conflicted. She’s finally having to come to terms once and for all with the fact that she’ll have to give up that passion in her life so that she can follow her conscience. Maybe all of that still qualifies as being weak or underdeveloped, but I think it was crucial to the main theme of the movie that they start with “you two were in love, now go from there.”
As for Sam’s being “obsequious” and Rick’s “abandoning” Sam, I think that’s a case of seeing something that just isn’t there.
I think great movies can be hurt by their own reputations. The first time I saw Citizen Kane, The Greatest Motion Picture Ever Made™, I was terribly disappointed. When I watched it again many years later without expecting perfection, I was impressed by its greatness.
Yes, Casablanca is somewhat dated and the plot hangs on some unrealistic contrivances, but it’s still a great film. It also helps if you try to imagine seeing it through the eyes of someone in the 1940s.
A side question about colorization: One day when I was kvetching about this process, a friend asked, “What’s the big deal? Just turn the color down.” But does that really work? Do the grayscale values remain the same?
Actually…when the young Hungarian woman is pleading with Rick for his help, she mentions that her husband has had to approach Renault directly. Rick, knowing full well what that entails, remarks, “I see Renault has become broad-minded”(!)
I just watched this classic again on DVD and having read a bit about Humphrey Bogart on the IMDB, I noticed something interesting that I had not noticed in previous viewings.
In the opening bar scenes, when Ugarte (Peter Lorre) is talking with Rick (Bogart), Rick appears to be playing a game of chess with no one. According to the IMDB, Bogart was a chess fan and played chess with US GIs by mail during WWII. I was wondering if Rick playing against an unseen opponent was an acknowledgement of the GIs Bogart played chess with by mail (US entered the war in 1941, Casablanca was filmed in 1942).
Does anyone have any info confirming this theory?