Casablanca Review

Everything about the production argues against it working. Warner Bros. shot it as contract-player product, pages arrived during filming, and nobody on set was certain which man Ilsa would leave with. What emerged is a film in which the writing carries a load most movies distribute across an entire craft team. Lines land as aphorism without straining, and Claude Rains gets the best of them, playing Renault as corruption so charming it reads as candor.

Arthur Edeson lights Rick's Cafe in slats and smoke while giving Ingrid Bergman a gauzy, faintly lit close-up whenever the film needs an argument won without speech. Bogart's contribution is restraint: he keeps Rick's decency buried under about four layers of grievance, so the turn at the airfield feels bought rather than granted. The Marseillaise sequence still works as pure crowd voltage, helped by a supporting cast of actual European emigres. The plot is a MacGuffin about transit letters, and it does not matter in the slightest.