Casablanca (DVD, 2000)

I may be prejudiced by the fact that I absolutely hate romance. Romantic comedy and musicals I can stand (to an extent, as I don’t like An American in Paris). But I hate pure romance.

I came into the movie thinking it was something like Notorious, romantic suspense or something of that nature. I was incredibly wrong. It was pure romance, pure romance.

Basically the plot is this: Rick (Humphrey Bogart), who runs a bar in Casablanca, where all the refugees go (during WWII), sees an old flame (Ingrid Bergman) again. This recalls the days in Paris shortly before he left. She comes and talks to him. She says she’s married to this guy (Paul Hendrid). Rick had seen them together in his bar. The guy is prominent on the Nazi blacklist and so the Gestapo, who just arrived, want to see to it that he stays in Casablanca. There are some twists and the movie ends.

Seen that way, it seems absurd that anyone could stretch this over the course of a movie an hour and forty minutes long. Frankly it is. Sure, I cut out all the mushy parts and the fancy lines (“Here’s looking at you, kid!”), etc.

Claude Rains and Peter Lorre are the best actors of the bunch. Bergman is okay. Hendrid sort of mutters his lines so it’s hard to understand them. I hate Bogart’s voice—it’s raw, high-pitched and sort of shrill. That and he kind of slurs or has a lisp or something. And his looks—his face looks like a hollowed out corps—haggard. Probably he was on drugs or alcohol.

The opening was horrible. Unnecessary and left me wondering who the movie was going to be about. I mean, I have no problem with establishing shots. But never should the camera stop on a person and should those people have an honest to goodness line (not brushing over). It makes you think the movie’s gonna be about them. But the opening to this movie does that constantly.

People say this is the best movie that has ever been made. I’ll second that, with one minor modification, “it’s the worst movie that has ever been made”. Fine, maybe not the worst. But just plain stupid. Not worth watching again. No tension, no real suspense. It’s a good movie to see what WWII was like (this was made before it was over). Other than that, it stinks on ice.