A perfect romantic cocktail set in a war driven story, which sets Casablanca apart from the rest of the romantic movies.
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains
Casablanca is probably the most romantic movie ever made. It’s a perfect romantic cocktail set in a war driven story, which sets Casablanca apart from the rest of the romantic movies. It is one of the few movies that don’t seem outdated even if it was created in the 1940’s. The casting is just too perfect to even imagine anyone else in the movie.
Humphrey Bogart plays Rick, an expatriate American who’s hiding from his painful past in Nazi controlled Vichy French Morocco. He warily ignores the World War II intrigue that swirls all around him, concentrating instead on running a popular Casablanca nightspot.
Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and her husband, Czech freedom fighter Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) wander into Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca. The two are on the run from the Nazis, and have come to the American-owned nightspot to lie low. But the German-controlled local government, headed by Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), is on the move, and Laszlo has to act quickly to get the letters of transit he came for, then escape.
Little does Ilsa know that the cafe is run by Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), the one true love of her life. When the two see each other, sparks fly and memories of an enchanted time in Paris come flooding back to their minds. The emotional turmoil and tension is overwhelming, and few of the scenes in the movie are the best in movie history.
It contains several powerful lines that immerse you into the movie all the way till the credits. An all-time favorite was a line Rick says when he sees Ilsa in his club, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” and this line is still used in several movie today. The dialogues are spell binding, and the song ‘As Time Goes By’ that’s played in the movie pours out the pain we feel in the characters.
One of the things that make Casablanca unique is that it stays true to itself without giving in to commonly held perceptions of crowd-pleasing tactics. And because of this, not despite it, Casablanca has become known as one of the greatest movies ever made. A must-watch for every romantic, after all, this movie is one of the biggest legends of romance movies.
Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay
