| Major Cast | |
|---|---|
| Humphrey Bogart | as Rick Blaine |
| Ingrid Bergman | as Ilsa Lund |
| Paul Henreid | as Victor Laszlo |
| Claude Rains | as Captain Louis Renault |
| Conrad Veidt | as Major Heinrich Strasser |
| Sydney Greenstreet | as Signor Ferrari |
| Peter Lorre | as Ugarte |
| S. Z. Sakall | as Carl |
| Madeleine Lebeau | as Yvonne |
| Dooley Wilson | as Sam, the piano player |
| MPAA Rating: | N/R |
| Distributor: | Warner Brothers |
| Release Date (US): | January 1943 |
| Domestic Box Office: | $? |
| Foreign Box Office: | $? |
| Production Budget: | $? (Est.) |
Meet Rick Blaine, proprietor of the most popular nightspot in wartime Casablanca. Rick is an American expatriate who helped the resistance in Paris. There he met and fell in love with Ilsa. As Nazi forces advanced toward the City of Light, they planned to flee together to Marseilles and then onward. But on the final day Ilsa did not show up at the station. Rick was forced to leave without her, holding only a note from her that explained nothing at all.
Winding up in Casablanca, he established Rick's Cafe Americain, earning a good living by welcoming all comers and sticking his neck out for nobody — until the day when Ilsa came back into his life, on the arm of her husband. This was Victor Laszlo, a leader of the resistance to the Nazi encroachment. Laszlo was a prize the Nazis were most eager to snare; he had slipped through their hands three times already. Just before their arrival, Rick had come into the possession of two letters of transport which provide the bearer safe passage out of Morocco.
Now Rick is faced with a dilemma: turn Laszlo over to Major Strausser and escape with Ilsa, or stick his neck out for somebody. Complicating his problem is Prefect of Police Renault, who knows him well and sticks very close. Renault anticipates a chance to ingratiate himself with Strausser.
This is the film for which Humphrey Bogart is best known. It won the Academy Award for best picture, and has been called the most popular and most quoted American film.
It is certainly a classic, well-paced and well-acted throughout. It is probably possible to anticipate, about halfway through, what Rick's decision will be — certainly by the end of the famous "duel of the anthems."1 But the looming presence of Captain Renault and the schweinhund Strausser preserves the tension to the very end.
My Rating:
10 out of 10
Capsule review: Excellent performances by every member of the cast make this black-and-white film a true classic, justly ranked as #2 on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 American films.
| IMDB Rating: 8.6 | Raters: 385,125 |
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