You must just remember this.

Casablanca arguably remains Hollywood’s finest moment, a film that succeeds on such a vast scale not because of anything experimental or deliberately earthshaking in its design, but for the way it adhered to and reaffirmed the movie-making conventions of its day. This is the film that played by the rules while elevating the form, and remains the touchstone for those who talk about Hollywood’s greatness.

It’s the first week in December, 1941, and in the Vichy-controlled African port city of Casablanca, American ex-pat Rick Blaine runs a gin joint he calls Rick’s Cafe Americaine. Everybody comes to Rick’s, including thieves, spies, Nazis, partisans, and refugees trying to make their way to Lisbon and, eventually, America. Rick is a tough, sour kind of guy, but fate hands him two sudden twists: a pair of unchallengeable exit visas, and a woman named Ilsa who left him broken-hearted in Paris and now needs him to help her and her resistance-leader husband escape.

Humphrey Bogart is Rick and Ingrid Bergman is Ilsa, in roles that are archetypes in film lore. They are great parts, very multilayered and resistant to stereotype, and both actors give career defining performances in what were superb careers. He’s mad at her for walking out on him, while she wants him to understand her cause, but there’s a lot going on underneath with both.

Casablanca is a great romance, not only for being so supremely entertaining with its humour and realistic-though-exotic wartime excitement, but because it’s not the least bit mushy. Take the way Rick’s face literally breaks when he first sees Ilsa in his bar, or how he recalls the last time he saw her in Paris: “The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.” There’s a real human dimension to these people that makes us care for them and relate to them in a way that belies the passage of years along with the film’s iconic song As Time Goes By.

But there’s so much to grab onto with a film like this. You can talk about the music, or the way the setting becomes a living character with its floodlights and Moorish traceries. Paul Henreid, as Victor Lazlo, is often looked at as a bit of a third wheel playing the role of Ilsa’s husband, but he manages to create a moral centre around which the rest of the film operates, and his enigmatic relationship with Rick and especially Ilsa, a woman who obviously admires her husband but can’t somehow ever bring herself to say she loves him, is something to wonder at.

There is a scene about halfway through the movie Casablanca that has become commonly known as The Battle of the Anthems. In Rick’s Café American Major Strasser leads a group of German officers in singing Die Wacht am Rhein at the top of their voices. Victor Lazlo, the leader of the French Resistance, cannot stand this act and while the rest of the club stares appalled at the Germans, Lazlo orders the band to play La Marseillaise. With a nod from Rick, the band begins playing, with Victor singing at the top of his voice. This in turn, inspires the whole club to begin singing and the Germans are forced to surrender and sit down at their table, humbled by the crowd’s patriotism and fervour.

All this leads to the film’s famous ending where Rick implores Ilsa to board the plane leaving Casablanca with her husband: “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now. Here’s looking at you, kid.”

For me, and many, the most interesting relationship in the movie is between Rick and Captain Louis Renault, the police prefect in Casablanca who is played by Claude Rains with a wonderful subtlety that builds as the film progresses. Theirs is a relationship of almost perfect cynicism, one-liners and professions of neutrality that provide much humour, as well as giving a necessary display of Rick’s darker side before and after Ilsa’s arrival.

Surely something should be said about Michael Curtiz, who not only directed this film but other great movies like Captain Blood, Angels With Dirty Faces and The Adventures Of Robin Hood; and he even found time the same year he made Casablanca to make Yankee Doodle Dandy. When you watch a film like Casablanca, you aren’t so much aware of the director, but that’s really a testament to Curtiz’s artistry. Casablanca is not only exceptionally well-paced but incredibly well-shot, every frame feeling well-thought-out without distracting from the overall story.

The thing that makes Casablanca great is that it speaks to that place in each of us that seeks some kind of inspiration or redemption. On some level, every character in the story receives the same kind of catharsis and their lives are irrevocably changed. Rick’s is the most obvious in that he learns to live again, instead of hiding from a lost love. He is reminded that there are things in the world more noble and important than he is and he wants to be a part of them. Louis, the scoundrel, gets his redemption by seeing the sacrifice Rick makes and is inspired to choose a side, where he had previously maintained careful neutrality. The stoic Lazlo gets his redemption by being shown that while thousands may need him to be a hero, there is someone he can rely upon when he needs inspiration in the form of his wife, who was ready to sacrifice her happiness for the chance that he would go on living.

It’s a film that reminds us why we go back to Hollywood again and again when we want to refresh our imaginations, and why we call it the dream factory. As the hawker of linens tells Ilsa at the bazaar, “You won’t find a treasure like this in all Morocco.” . . . and nor, for that matter, in all the world of movies.

Casablanca is on my top 10 favourite films of all-time.

Enjoy.

and the tease for next weeks post . . . Nuts am I ?.