I got the impression that Rick and Isla definitely had sex. And I interpreted the “and for old time’s sake I let her pretend” as Rick’s admission of it to Laszlo.
Urk? I mean, they don’t show them together in bed or anything explicit (thanks to the Production Code restrictions) but I think it’s implied that they did the deed.
Yeah, I just popped in the DVD and watched the scene; they go from Elsa and Rick in clutches, with her saying, “…if you knew how much I loved you…how much I still love you!”, the passionate kiss with rising music, then a blend transition to a phallic-looking tower with a spotlight on top of it, then another blend trans to a post-coital Rick, looking reflectively out the window. I know today they’d have a scene with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie (playing the leads) bumping together on the couch with a nice nipply money shot, but then, they’d also end the film with a running gunfight in which Captain Renault (played by Jason Statham) saves Rick by gunning down Major Strasser (Alan Rickman) double fisted while standing upright on a motorcycle. (Steve Buscemi plays Ugarte, and I think Cedric the Entertainer stands in for Sidney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari.)
Yeah, she cheats. It’s a nasty bit of work, too; you can see that she’s fully prepared to gun Rick down, but she realizes that if she sleeps with him she can manipulate him into giving her escape. I never realized before just how twisted she really is. Now I’ll have to go back though the film again, frame by frame, and see if there are other clues of her perfidy that I missed.
Meh. Rick would have done better with Yvonne, who at least has some spunk in her attitude. Strasser will no doubt teach him the fine art of extracting carnal failures from women at Brazzaville while secretly lusting after him.
And as far as sympathetic would-be cheaters go, Annina (the Bulgarian girl) gets a lot more sympathy from me. She’s willing to sleep with the sleezy Strasser not because she wants to, but because she knows there’s no other way to help her husband (“He’s just a boy,” she tells a seemingly disinterested Rick) and knows that they’ll have a bad life (or perhaps none at all) if they go back to Bulgaria. She seems seriously conflicted, rather than just crying crocodile tears like Elsa.
I’ll take Alida Valli’s Anna Schmidt from The Third Man over any of the women in this film; at least she stands behind her bloke, regardless that he was/is/was a sociopathic black marketeer selling diluted penicillin to the hospitals.
Stranger
You’re mixing up Major Strasser and Captain Renault.
All of this talk about the cheating Ilsa reminds me that Ingrid Bergman’s life was definitely imitating that art.
Is it wrong that I want to see this version? 
Many years ago, Playboy published one author’s version of what happened in that missing piece of the film. All I remember about it was Ilsa’s shouting “Fokk me, Rick!”
If it’s wrong then I don’t want to right. I want to see this as well.
With a wise, aphorism dispensing Morgan Freeman as Sam/narrator.
So I did; my error.
Yes, but I’m sure it would be profitable anyway, what with Tony/Ridley Scott directing and producing.
Personally, I want to see the David Mamet version of the film. Campbell Scott plays a guileless Rick, Rebecca Pidgen is the seemingly ingenue but deceptively manipulative Ilsa, William H. Macy as the clueless Victor Lazlo, Ricky Jay as Senior Ferrari, David Paymer as Ugarte, Steve Martin as Captain Renault, and Ed O’Neill as Major Strasser. We’ve got to work Sam Rockwell in there, maybe as the roulette mechanic, and Joe Mantegna as Sam, who obliquily tries to warn Rick that he’s walking into a trap with Ilsa.
Stranger
I am not interested in the Mamet version. A bunch of self-parodying wisecracks and rafts of neither realistic nor dramatic non-sequitur dialogue. Nah. Not for me.
“The World According to Garp.” Garp’s infidelities are presented as minor little inconsquential acts (boys will be boys, la-de-de-de-dah). Helen’s affair ends extremely tragically for her, her family, and her lover.
Wow. Where’s the love, man??
I grant your interpretation is not unreasonable – but I take Rick’s late line of “…and I let her pretend…” to suggest that he didn’t take full advantage of her pretense.
Until the first time Yvonne gets drunk and bangs some random bar-goer, sure. Sorry - sloppy drunk, near-stalker women don’t make it on my short list of good marriage prospects.
That much is true. But her plight does touch Rick – not only because he suggests betting on ‘22’ to Annina’s hubby Jan, but because of that look he gets after her question: “Oh, monsieur, you are a man. If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world, but she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”
He takes this short pause, and looks at something no one else can see, and then says grimly, “Nobody ever loved me that much.”
I took it to mean exactly the opposite. He let her pretend she was in love with him, i.e., they had sex.
Lara too. She was married to Pasha early in the book.
Ist it embarrassing at this point to admit I’ve never seen Casablanca?
I actually felt sorry for the Liev Schreiber character, and didn’t admire the Diane Lane one (now that’s a first! 
).
Tragic, yes, except it does set up this comedy gold:
“But, ohh, to have it bitten off in a Buick…”
Sam Spade is cheating on his partner in The Maltese Falcon.
Regards,
Shodan
The first movie I thought of is “The Good Girl” with Jennifer Aniston* and Jake Gyllenhaal. I didn’t see her husband as *that * bad of a guy, but the intention was for her to be a sympathetic character.
*The only one of her movies I can stand to watch, despite her performance. She’s a terrible actress.
Ooh, I love that movie! I could never forgive them for having the affairs, but there was something so sweet about them together. Seeing them change so much over the years and grow apart and come back together, in terms of where they were in their lives, it was endearing to see them still committed to seeing each other.