Confession: Until this weekend, I had never seen "Casablanca," considered one of the greatest movies ever made, an iconic touchstone in American popular culture. The legend goes like this: I was in college at the University of Illinois at Chicago, working a weekend part-time kitchen job at B&B Catering on the near Southwest Side and also co-editing the weekly student newspaper. I was busy while trying to maintain an A-minus GPA. So I decided to set aside a whole evening to unplug from all that -- "Casablanca" was scheduled to air at 7 o'clock on Channel 9. Even back then I knew it should be part of my cultural education, long before I would start writing about film regularly.
After dinner I went to my room, turned on the portable television set, dimmed the lights, reclined on my bed -- finally relaxing. And then, probably not long after the opening credits, I fell fast asleep. Lights out for the full two hours. Oh, well, I tried. Now, nearly four decades later, I finally patched the hole in my game. Without commercial breaks ...
CASABLANCA (1942) (A) - What can you say? It is filled with lines that have become embedded in our pop culture for decades. It's Bogie and Bergman, the good guys vs. the Nazis. The setting is exotic, the booze flows, the intrigue builds, and there's Sam (Dooley Wilson) at the piano, to tug at our heartstrings with Rick and Ilsa's song, "As Time Goes By." As Herman Hupfeld had written a decade before, during the depths of the Depression: "You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss / a sigh is just a sigh."
Sigh. Even after all the time that has gone by, the parodies that have accumulated, the postwar glow that has worn out its welcome -- "Casablanca" still delivers. The story, the lines, the performances -- cutting edge for their time -- retain their power. It's a thrilling movie, even if you know in advance who gets on that plane at the end.
Bogart's Rick Blaine is a hardened ex-pat who, after a series of dalliances with underground democratic movements in Europe, finds himself lying low in Morocco running a nightclub while walking a fine line among the Nazis, resistance and collaborators. Bergman's Ilsa is married to Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a resistance leader once feared dead. Ilsa and Victor are among the desperados seeking the transit letters that have fallen into Rick's lap and which will save the lives of whoever uses them to flee to freedom.
Thus we have the epic set-up -- the "fight for love and glory," as the song goes -- of a love triangle unfolding in the early days of World War II, when no one new if democracy would defeat fascism. (Still an open question?) Amid the decadence of wartime Casablanca -- drinking, gambling, black-market haggling -- an international cast (including a marvelous Sidney Greenstreet as a rival club owner, Claude Rains as the French police captain Renault, and Peter Lorre as Ugarte the street hustler) savors a script (by Howard Koch and Julius and Philip Epstein) that crackles with wit and charm. Director Michael Curtiz makes sure it zips along in refined noir style. It is a cauldron of moral dilemmas tinged with old-fashioned romantic schmaltz.
All the while, Rick drinks and smolders, and Ilsa agonizes about the choice she must make. Bogart's scowl is softened by those eyes of Ingrid Bergman, where all of her magic is contained. I defer the rest of the analysis to this Roger Ebert reconsideration from 1996. Whether you've ever seen "Casablanca" or haven't for a while, cue it up on a date night, dim the lights -- and hopefully you'll have had a nap earlier in the day, so you can savor this masterpiece.
GASLIGHT (1944) (B-minus) - Our curiosity got the best of us, marking the end of a presidential administration with a throwback to the origins (oranges?) of the term for making up lies and pretending reality isn't what it really is in order to make another person go crazy. Bergman plays the young wife who moves back into the London home where her aunt died, along with the creepy new husband who apparently stalked her and willed her into matrimony.
From the stable of fabled director George Cukor, this one slogs along for nearly two hours, taking its damn sweet time for Paula Alquist (Bergman) to start going crazy and then for her to figure out that she is not. Charles Boyer is magically suspicious, but he's pretty dull on the screen. A teenage Angela Lansbury debuts with a splash as a saucy maid.
This is a classic of film noir, and Bergman does her best to bring some realism to the era of emoting. But the suspense is just too creaky, and the inevitable reveal -- coaxed out by Joseph Cotton's handsome detective -- eventually loses its impact.
BONUS TRACK
HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR (1959) (B) - This foundational film of the French New Wave from Alan Resnais has its moments, but it's a pretty chatty and solemn rumination on both the joys and horrors of both remembering and forgetting. Resnais shows a little too much deference to the flowery screenplay by Marguerite Duras, about a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who visits Hiroshima 14 years after World War II to film a movie and has a fling with a Japanese war veteran (Eiji Okada). Through flashbacks, the actress slowly unspools the wartime tale of her forbidden love with a German soldier that got him shot and her imprisoned in her family's basement. Rough stuff. Resnais' crisp black-and-white cinematography is bold and assured (it's his first feature after more than a decade of making documentary shorts), and his luxurious images -- in particular the modestly naked bodies of his handsome couple -- must have amazed audiences 60 years ago. However, the story itself creaks and lurches in ways that have not worn well.
From the soundtrack:
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