MikePadgett.com

Casablanca

— Play it as many times as you want, Sam. I'll not get tired of it!”

• Director: Michael Curtiz
• United States, 1942
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Casablanca needs no introduction, except maybe the first few bars of As Time Goes By. It’s a masterfully told, elliptical yarn about a difficult period and after so many decades, it’s too easy to overlook the fact that it was contemporary to those times.

Bogart’s world weary ex-pat Rick Blaine runs an upmarket club frequented by a microcosm of affluent refugees, shysters and officials. A past lover who jilted Rick in Paris arrives with her Resistance leader husband of whom Rick was hitherto unaware. Should Rick help them escape Europe or try to regain her love and elope?

A relatively small cast ensures that character development is evenly spread and the plotting is detailed without being overly elaborate. Every aspect of the production is consistently excellent. As such, we can think of Casablanca as a self-contained capsule of cinematic perfection whose longevity has stretched far beyond the era of propaganda movies.