Casablanca is a good solid little film, but it's not a masterpiece. As I wrote in my review of it:
'Casablanca is quite a modern film, in terms of pacing (and in some aspects of editing), for within the first ten or twelve minutes, you feel as if you know these archetypal characters (for good or ill), as if you’d already had a full movie’s worth of them under your belt, and this is part of the reason why the film sucks you in to its vortex, and gets better, subjectively, as it goes on, even if, objectively, it’s a fairly static film, in terms of plotting. Yet, the film has not dated well. The two most obvious aspects of this are the not so special effects (at the level of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930s British films) and the handling of the black character, Sam. Yes, the film reflects its time fine enough, in that sense, but there still is a cringe-inducing quality to Dooley Wilson’s slightly above coonish attitude of deference to Rick. Despite many critics’ claims that the film portrays the two men as equals, this is clearly not so. Sam’s deference is typical of black depictions of the time, as if he had no personal nor interior life of his own, as if he exists merely as an extension of his white friend and employer. The worst scene in the film, though, in this aspect, is when Bergman’s Ilsa offhandedly refers to same as the ‘boy’ who plays piano, even though he’s clearly fortysomething years old, and a decade and a half or more older than Ilsa. The moment is teeth-grinding to a modern sensibility because, unlike the black characters in Gone With The Wind, with this film set in France’s colony (as well as Africa), there was no reason to not reflect the more modern and accepting French attitude toward blacks. Naturally, this aspect dates the film, cementing it to a bygone era (in the worst sense), as the lack of other contravening social or aesthetic pluses means this flaw is unmitigated. This, and many of the other flaws I’ve enumerated, certainly makes Casablanca far from the great or ‘perfect film’ its champions claim. The truth is, the more one cogitates on the film, the more flaws one finds with it, and the lower it sinks in estimation. Yet, this serves to point out the power and correctness of objectively critically evaluating art, because it does not allow personal biases to cloud judgment, pro or con; for, criticism is analysis, and analysis is always about evaluation, for analysis without evaluation is merely recapitulation and description, and what is the point of merely describing a work of art? The art should always be its own best description.'
But, there's also the acting. I wrote of the three main leads:
'....it is also the flaw of acting that ranges from mediocre to bad. First, let’s go with the performances of some of the leading characters, and let me start by stating that most of the characterizations of the acting abilities of the actors in this film, by critics, are often quite wrongheaded. Let us start with the three top billed actors, Humphrey Bogart as club owner Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman as his ex-lover Ilsa Lund, and Paul Henreid as Ilsa’s husband, the Czechoslovakian Nazi Resistance outlaw, Victor Laszlo. Virtually all critiques of this trio leave Henreid as the odd man out, mainly because the film focuses on the love angle between Rick and Ilsa. But, from a purely technical standpoint, Henreid gives, by far, the best acting performance of the trio (and, it’s not even close). Because it is the most restrained and understated, however, it usually gets dismissed as stiff acting, rather than good acting of an intentionally stiff character. Well, the character of Victor is certainly restrained, and a bit stiff, but the performance of Henreid is not. In many ways, his performance reminds me of the performance of Masayuki Mori, as the murdered samurai husband in Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, Rashomon. Like Mori, Henreid conveys emotional depth and complexity with his eyes alone, or even the slight lift of a brow. He is restrained, but this is because his character is über-disciplined. He (the character) is a concentration camp escapee, and a guerilla fighter, who has to not draw attention to himself, and must repress his emotions. He is not demonstrative in his overt feelings toward Ilsa, but one need only look at Henreid’s eyes, and the physical postures of his constant leaning in toward Ilsa, to see how Victor truly adores his wife. And, despite what some critics say, his two time overt declaration of love for Ilsa stands in stark positive contrast to the more cartoonish and caveman-like refusal to utter such words by Bogart’s Rick. Furthermore, Victor shows his love for Ilsa throughout the film, while Rick’s love is displayed only in the final scene, but even Rick’s final gesture is not something that emanates from within. Why? Because he ends up doing the very thing that Victor initially suggests to Rick that he is willing to do- allow Rick to leave Casablanca and take his wife with him, for her own safety! Why? Because we never get a moment that we doubt Victor’s love for Ilsa, whereas there is the sneaking suspicion that Rick merely had the hots for Ilsa, even if he blew it up into more than it was. That not a single critic, to my knowledge, in the nearly seven decades since the film’s release, has ever commented on Rick’s final ‘grand and altruistic gesture’ merely being the inverse of Victor’s earlier suggestion, and that this places Victor at the center of the film, heroically, maturely (in contrast to the more puerile Rick and Ilsa), romantically, and dramatically, is further proof that a) most critics simply are not good enough at their jobs to break down more complex aspects of a work of art, and b) they too often rely on critically cribbing others in their profession. This means that a few ‘talking points’ per film are disseminated by the most widely known and read critics, and all the ancillary ‘second and third tier critics’ merely regurge the same talking points, supplemented with their own biased and emotion-bases yeas or nays on the film. But, getting back to Henreid’s characterization, one need only look at the cheesy scene in the bar, where Victor hears the Nazis singing their song, Die Wacht Am Rhein, and dares to get the band to play La Marseillaise, then look in Victor’s eyes, to see that, far from what critics claim, Victor is a man of great passion and principles from the get go, and this break from his usual restraint gains in power precisely because it is a break, but one that seems wholly natural for a man who has been frustrated for the bulk of his scenes in the film, and then feels he is having his face rubbed in it. While the political implications of the scene have lost their resonance (as do most blatantly political gestures in art), Henreid’s volcanically restrained performance in that scene has not. '
But, look at Lorre's performance. It is small, canned, and off the rack, as was much of his work in Hollywood, after M skyrocketed him to acclaim. Hollywood did not invent typecasting in the last quarter century, but just compare the scenes and writing.
'Tis a shame, but Lorre never really hit his full potential as an actor, although he may have cashed in well.
