The worst ever is in Army of Shadows. A masterpiece by any measure, but the airplane shots are just atrocious.
I adore Casablanca as well. It’s one of my dad’s favorites, so I grew up watching it (and every other Humphrey Bogart movie as well).
There’s so much about it that makes it great. The Marseillaise scene is definitely my favorite, I have a hard time not singing along, although I sometimes do, much to the bemusement of my guests.
Subtle humor, like the “I’m shocked - shocked - to find out that there is gambling going on here.” “Your winnings, sir.” “Oh, thank you.” Or the line about coming to Casablanca for the waters…
What’s amazing, to me, is that my dad told me it was one of the B movies they produced that year (can’t remember what the “big hit” was supposed to be) so they filmed the whole thing in a week (this being the time a movie studio produced like 50 films a year). How funny that this film they expected to be a nondescript Saturday afternoon diversion ended up being one of the most memorable movies ever.
Makes me want to watch it right now. Too bad I lent it to a friend and still haven’t gotten it back.
Hmm. Some exec may have been skeptical about its success, but it was definitely not a B picture: Bogart, Rains, Bergman, Curtiz, Steiner–were all unquestionably A-listers. And the amount paid for the rights was some kind of a record at the time, IIRC. It was very much an A project.
Not exactly a B movie, but one of many cranked out rather quickly and not considered likely to be much of a major draw, at least no more than other films being produced. It was just one of many films being made, and no one thought it would turn out to be especially extraordinary.
The DVD we have has a very good short documentary on the making of the film. Two brothers wrote the script, and I especially like the survivng brother telling how they came up with the ending. They knew the girl was going to fly away and Bogie get left behind to kill the Nazi, but they could not figure out how to work it that he gets away with it. He said they were driving down the street one day, when suddenly he just brakes to a stop, looks at his brother, and they both say at the same time, “Round up the usual suspects!”
Perhaps B movie wasn’t the right term. The way I heard it was that movie studios pumped out dozens of movies in a year, fully expecting most of them to just be your dime-a-dozen Saturday matinee fare, and focused most of their time and energy on the one or two “hits” they were producing.
Well, according to Wiki, the shooting took 2 months, longer than I had heard. I dunno, I can’t remember if it was my dad or the guy at Turner Classic Movies who claimed that it wasn’t expected to be such a hit and the film execs didn’t pay much attention to it.
ETA- what Siam Sam said.
Right. FWIW, that was pretty much par for the course; the studios were quite literally factories of product. Very, very few projects had the buildup and “buzz” of, say, Gone with the Wind.
Chokes me up too…and I’m neither French nor American and WWII was waaay before my time.
There was homoerotic subtext? They were just pals, man! PALS!!
It was a great B Grade movie, and also one of my favourites. Plenty of holes in the script. But in the long run, superb performances from the understated Raines and Greenstreet- and Bogart and Bergman- carried it.
There is not a lot to dislike- and some very stirring scenes.
Ah, but it was a beautiful friendship.
My favorite line: at the end, when Bogie has the gun pointed at Claude Rains to get him to make the call to give the clearance to let them get to the airport:
Bogie: “Remember, I have a gun pointed at your heart.”
Claude Raines, picking up the phone: “It’s my least vulnerable part.”
My favorite exchange is probably:
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[Croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
It is a great movie because it had the important aspects of great movies:
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Great acting. Cast itself isn’t everything, but this cast outdid itself in their roles. Paul Henreid, for example, managing the Victor Laszlo role, able to understand his wife, and at the same time, flinty hard when it came to the Germans and their drinking song.
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Wonderful cinematography. The film should never be colorized; it’s a classic example of what you can achieve with shadows in black and white.
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Plot that isn’t transparent from the beginning. You just never know; is Ilsa going to come that night? Will they get back together? Who is going to leave on the plane?
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Story for the ages. Good guys against bad guys. What else can you say?
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Wonderful music.
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Memorable lines and moments.
I really cannot think of any movie that I’ve seen that consistently scores in all the categories like Casablanca does. Not to say that I don’t have a ton of favorite movies, I do. But somewhere along the line, most of them manage to miss a beat. Casablanca not. 
Right, that’s why we have no immigrants trying to get here anymore.
What Red Roses might be thinking of on the ‘shot in a week’ comment is a remark made in that same interview. Paraphrasing (because I’m too lazy to pull the disk down and find the thing):
The thing to remember is that Warner Bros. was turning out fifty movies a year – a movie a week. Casablanca was just that week’s movie. We had no idea that it turn out the way it would.
Too late.
See November, 1988.
I think what makes Casablanca great is that it starts out as a cynical guy film, turns into a romantic movie, and then, after one of the greatest romantic endings of all time, turns back into a cynical guy film.
That may be why it’s one of the few movies that gets named by men and women, about equally, in those “favorite movie” polls. As opposed to, say, The Godfather or Gone With the Wind.
In my high school film club (coincidentally the exact same group of students and teacher as the AP English class), the teacher showed us Casablanca and Plan 9 from Outer Space on subsequent weeks, just to show us the extremes the genre was capable of. The best movie ever, together with the worst movie ever. Respectively, in case there was any confusion.
And that, right there shows why it was Hollywood’s golden age. Yeah, the studios may have been cranking movies out like McDonald’s does hamburgers, but the people making the movies actually thought and cared about the job they were doing, and weren’t simply there for a paycheck. Nowadays, if they couldn’t figure out the ending, they’d just say, “Ah, have the effects guys just throw in a bunch of explosions. That’ll work.” They had a vision for how the film would turn out, and they had incredible limitations forced upon them, not merely technological, but also financial, so to get the film to work, they had to think things through, knowing they couldn’t simply punt with a bunch of fancy effects.
I’ll also say that most of the actors working today couldn’t hold a candle to the likes of Bogey, Raines, and Bergman (to name but a few in the cast).
I’d say there are just as many good (and better) actors working today as in the 1940s, just as there are plenty of mediocre-to-bad ones today as back then.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t see someone like Tom Cruise going up against Bogey and coming out a winner. Harrison Ford, James Caan, Roy Schieder, and Gene Hackman, sure, but they’re not the box office draws these days. There’s a thimblefull of big name stars these days, who’d I say compare favorably with the likes of Bogey: Christian Bale, Ed Norton, and Hugh Jackman. Most of the rest, are either okay actors (Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, and Nick Cage) or pretty people (Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and Josh Harnett) with very little ability at all.
Mind you, I don’t think that it’s because there’s a lack of talent available, it’s that the business model of Hollywood has changed. They went from cranking out a bunch of films with modest budgets, to cranking out a handfull of films with huge budgets. I’d prefer it if they capped the budget of all films at about $60 million or less and made better films, than the current model we have where they’re willing to spend huge amounts of money to make a film which is pretty to look at, but has very little substance.