Rating: - Good not great
First, let's go with the performances of some of the leading
characters, and let me start by stating that most of the
characterizations of the acting abilities of the actors in this film,
by critics, are often quite wrongheaded. Let us start with the three
top billed actors, Humphrey Bogart as club owner Rick Blaine, Ingrid
Bergman as his ex-lover Ilsa Lund, and Paul Henreid as Ilsa's husband,
the Czechoslovakian Nazi Resistance outlaw, Victor Laszlo. Virtually
all critiques of this trio leave Henreid as the odd man out, mainly
because the film focuses on the love angle between Rick and Ilsa. But,
from a purely technical standpoint, Henreid gives, by far, the best
acting performance of the trio (and, it's not even close). Because it
is the most restrained and understated, however, it usually gets
dismissed as stiff acting, rather than good acting of an intentionally
stiff character....one need only look at the cheesy scene in the bar, where Victor hears the Nazis singing their song, Die Wacht Am Rhein, and dares to get the band to play La Marseillaise, then look in Victor's eyes, to see that, far from what critics claim, Victor is a man of great passion and principles from the get go, and this break from his usual restraint gains in power
precisely because it is a break, but one that seems wholly natural for
a man who has been frustrated for the bulk of his scenes in the film,
and then feels he is having his face rubbed in it. While the political
implications of the scene have lost their resonance (as do most
blatantly political gestures in art), Henreid's volcanically restrained
performance in that scene has not. And, as an asides, compare that
scene with a similar scene toward the ends of the aforementioned Paths
Of Glory, where a captured German girl is put on stage, in front of
drunken French soldiers seemingly willing to ravage her, until she
starts singing a plaintive German tune of a soldier and his lost love.
The drunk soldiers quiet down, and eventually start humming along with
the 'enemy,' and slowly show that they have not been totally inured by
carnage. A comparison of these two scenes (their structure and
placement) neatly and clearly shows why Casablanca is mere
entertainment, while Paths Of Glory is great art. Simply stated,
without the character (in his physical being and internal composition)
of Victor Laszlo, Casablanca does not even reach being a good prose
melodrama.

Now, contrast Henreid's Victor with Bogart's Rick. Rick is rather one
dimensional, despite the film's early evocations of depth. His
attraction to Ilsa seems quite superficial; after all, in the flashback
scenes in Paris, and even those in Casablanca, does he ever speak of
higher purpose? Despite some wittier lines....is Rick Blaine sufficiently different from the Sam Spade Bogart essayed in The Maltese Falcon, or any of the rather stolid thugs he played throughout the 1930s? No.

That brings me to the last and least of the trio of star performances:
Ingrid Bergman's rather mediocre portrayal of Ilsa Lund. First, it's
not a bad performance, but it's nowhere near great. One need only look
at contemporaneous performances by a Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford,
Bette Davis, or even Judy Garland, to see how much Bergman pales in
contrast. And, it's rather apparent that Ilsa really loves Victor, not
Rick, because anyone who's ever really been in love knows that she
would have stayed with Rick, no matter.

But the biggest thing that prevents the film from greatness is that it
simply plumbs no depths, it simply has no great themes. There is
nothing in the film that is so overwhelmingly great, technically or
performance-wise, that can put it in a class with many of the other
highly praised great films of the past. Seen next to Citizen Kane,
Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai, La Dolce Vita, or 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Casablanca comes up short, way short.

On the plus side, Casablanca is quite a modern film, in terms of pacing
(and in some aspects of editing), for within the first ten or twelve
minutes, you feel as if you know these archetypal characters (for good
or ill), as if you'd already had a full movie's worth of them under
your belt, and this is part of the reason why the film sucks you in to
its vortex, and gets better, subjectively, as it goes on, even if,
objectively, it's a fairly static film, in terms of plotting.

Film critic Andrew Sarris claimed that Casablanca was, 'the most
decisive exception to the auteur theory,' but he was wrong, and wrong
for several reasons. First, auteur theory generally applies toward
films or filmmakers that are great, and while Casablanca has been
claimed as great, no one has ever made that claim for Curtiz. Secondly, greatness is part and parcel of a vision, and vision is, almost by definition, a property only a singular person can have, not a group; thus Sarris's very admission that Casablanca had more than one 'auteur' makes it also outside the scope of auteur theory, by definition, not an exception to the theory....the film lacks vision, and is a stylistic and narrative hodgepodge. Still, it does entertain, and is an interesting piece of Americana. Also, the lower the expectations you have of the film, the more entertaining it seems. Ah, the flicker of illusion!

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