Canter Bridge

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My wife walked into the room this weekend as I was watching the last scenes of Casablanca. ‘Isn’t it amazing how it lasts …?’, she observed of the Bogey-Bergman film that had moved me so. Indeed.

She grew up with movies and Hollywood. I did not. I’m just catching up with cultural slice of Americana. There’s a reason why Casablanca routinely appears in the top ten on lists of the greatest films ever made. ‘Amazing how it’s lasted.

Bogey is superb in his wit and cynicism. As a newcomer to his films, I can’t discern whether this accrues to Bogart as actor or, alternatively, to Bogart as beneficiary of superb writers. One thing for sure, after this film I’ll have opportunity to form an opinion on that. Casablanca will not be my last Bogey film.

Bergman in soft focus nearly makes the cameraman tremble. In a day when a woman’s beauty had to be portrayed by means other than having her remove her clothes, Bergman comes across as irresistible, compelling, a woman worthy of waiting at a train station when everyone except you knows she won’t show. Perhaps even the kind of woman who could entice a man like Bogey’s Rick to abandon his practiced and protective cynicism. A woman, even, worthing sticking his neck out for. Rick, it is observed more than once, sticks his neck out for no one. It is one of the film’s ironic and pivotal lies, for in fact he does.

The casting, as many reviewers have observed, is arguably perfect. There is not a slow movement in this film, remarkable in a motion picture with very little of what we would today call ‘action’.

Casablanca is one for the ages. It’s astonishing, as the good woman might have said, how it lasts.