Casablanca lands so routinely in listings of the top two or three movies of all time, it’s become almost boring to call it great. It’s the definition of a Hollywood masterpiece. The scenes and the characters have taken on mythological lives of their own. But Casablanca manages to be strongly original while also synthesizing parts of many films of its time: a wartime setting, a hero with shades of grey in his past, a female lead who wants something she can’t have, humor and tragedy and parody and sacrifice. And, of course, doomed love.
Although Casablanca was a big-budget film with established stars and first-rate writers, no one involved with its production expected it to stand out among the hundreds of pictures produced by Hollywood yearly. It was rushed into release to take advantage of the publicity from the Allied invasion of North Africa a few weeks earlier, and it had a healthy if not remarkable initial run. But the story of Rick, the expat owner of a gambling den in corrupt Vichy-controlled Casablanca and Ilsa, his former lover and wife of a European resistance leader, wasn’t ready to be forgotten. Good art tells us stories; great art makes demands of us. Casablanca demands we break our own hearts like Rick, make dangerous choices like Ilsa, sing like Sam and scheme like Louis. The movie remains timeless because those feelings are, too.
