| |
At
a time when everything on television seems dismal—the economy in
crisis, the race to the presidency sunk to the level of betchas
and winks—we think that turning off the television and watching Casablanca
(Sp., lit. white house) is the perfect antidote! Casablanca
is the best sort of classic—it seems to get better and better as
time goes by! With some of the best lines in Hollywood
history and a marvelously constructed and crackling script, one
can watch it just for the sheer pleasure of its dialogue.
But it's got everything else, all the necessary ingredients—wit,
intrigue, action, suspense, nostalgia, and a wonderfully
sentimental love story at its heart. Humphrey Bogart plays
Rick whose Casablanca nightclub Rick's Café Americain is the
place to be and where everybody seems to have washed up in this
second World War film: spies, traitors, refugees, the French
Resistance and the Nazis, even old loves. And
then she walks in . . . "Of all the gin joints in all the
towns in all the world, she walks into mine . . . ."
There is the old flame Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) who glows, Rick
Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) whose cynicism and hard-edged cool hide a
broken heart, and Ilsa's husband, the Czech
resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). There is the
pitch-perfect performance by Claude Rains as the French police
chief and a marvelously expressive Dooley Wilson as Sam. It
is nuanced yet fast-paced, and it's got style in spades. Watch it
again. |
|
|
