Due to the fact our American Thanksgiving is fixed to the fourth Thursday in November, the actual date floats around the last of the month. This year it coincides with the premiere of the 1942 film Casablanca, starring, as pretty much everyone on the globe knows, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Henries, and while he gets secondary billing, the show stealing Claude Rains. And, yes, a host of others deserving our recalling.
As the Wikipedia article tells us “Although Casablanca was an A-list film with established stars and first-rate writers, no one involved with its production expected it to be anything out of the ordinary. It was just one of hundreds of pictures produced by Hollywood every year. Casablanca had its world premiere on November 26, 1942, in New York City and was released nationally on January 23, 1943, in the United States. The film was a solid if unspectacular success in its initial run, rushed into release to take advantage of the publicity from the Allied invasion of North Africa a few weeks earlier.” The New Yorker’s review said it was “pretty tolerable.”
Others noticed something more. It would among a host of nominations pick up the Oscar for best film, screenplay, and director.
That Wikipedia article continues how “Umberto Eco wrote that ‘by any strict critical standards… Casablanca is a very mediocre film.’ He viewed the changes the characters undergo as inconsistent rather than complex: ‘It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects.’ However, he added that due to the presence of multiple archetypes which allow ‘the power of Narrative in its natural state without Art intervening to discipline it’, it is a movie reaching ‘Homeric depths’ as a ‘phenomenon worthy of awe.'”
Some have called it the perfect movie.
Me, all I know is that I love it, and I love many scenes all by themselves. In the wake of the horrors in Paris, I posted on my Facebook page the lovely “La Marseillaise” scene. Seemed a right thing in that moment.
But, of the many scenes, for today, for here, I’m going to have to go with the conclusion.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In