No. 2 (tie): “Casablanca” (1942)

“I’m the only cause I’m interested in.”
~~Rick Blaine

“Casablanca” is remembered as the motion picture industry’s happiest accidental success, and there’s much evidence to suggest the film deserves that reputation. This was a motion picture of meager ambitions: tight budget, hastily scribbled lines, an ending even leading lady Ingrid Bergman didn’t know until the last moment. It should have been a fiasco.Yet in a display of jaw-dropping magic, these elements combined to create a sly, wistful, sizzling romantic drama and one of the greatest films ever made.

Surely there are scads of essays and reviews to support this claim, but it’s better to speak from the heart. And “Casablanca” reminds this heart why directors keep making motion pictures: because they create worlds outside our own, with characters with hurts and longings that mirror our own yet seem so much bigger. We have room to explore all our feelings in these worlds. “Casablanca” reminds this heart why people love movies: because a cherished few take us on journeys we don’t want to come back from. “Casablanca,” adapted from Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” takes us on such a trip, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman leading the way. The film captivates so partly because of their talent and their palpable chemistry; they don’t make onscreen pairings like this anymore. They don’t make leading men like Bogart anymore, either, actors who exude charm and crack wise while hinting at emotional damage that’s nearly beyond repair. When Bogart bites into lines like “I stick my neck out for nobody,” he doesn’t leave a crumb behind.

Thus, Bogart is a fine choice to lead the A-list cast of “Casablanca.” Bogart is Rick Blaine, a scornful merican expatriate living in Casablanca, Morocco, during World War II. Rick runs Café Américain, the local watering hole with a back room for gambling, and his ever-so-slight nods determine who sees that back room. His café is home of sorts for the downtrodden and the ones who trampled on them: Nazi officials like Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), a member of the German army, and self-serving local police captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains); underhanded wheeler-dealers like Signor Ferrari (first-rate character actor Sydney Greenstreet) and small-time crook Ugarte (Lorre, always a delight), who stole coveted letters of transit — a free pass from German-run Europe to Portugal to the U.S. — from two murdered couriers; and refugees hoping to get to America. Rick welcomes them all, but he’s loathe to take up any cause that doesn’t benefit him … until Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman who burned him, turns up at the café wanting papers for herself and her husband Victor (Paul Henreid). This is the one thing that flaps the seemingly unflappable Rick: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Bogart’s weary, wry delivery of that famous line remains unmatched. It also suggests Ilsa’s reappearance is about so much more than letters of transit.

So many iconic lines are there in “Casablanca” that the movie nabbed six of the 100 spots in the American Film Institute’s “100 Years … 100 Movie Quotes.”  There must have been a cap to let other films in, for nearly every snippet of dialogue is exquisite enough to deserve a spot. Every line has a purpose. Unearthing old hurts or covering them up. Generating intimacy or backing away from it. Kowtowing to German authority or subverting it. “Casablanca” is one of the rare films with a script where every line feels deliberate and faultlessly placed. Arthur Edeson’s cinematography offers stunning backlighting for a script like this, with his palette of blacks and grays surrounding Bogart — the lighting in Bogart’s drunken scene with pianist Sam (Dooley Wilson) is masterful — and special lighting used to envelope Bergman in a hazy cloud. Details like this do more than set the mood; they provide a look for the characters that is potently unforgettable.

The performances, too, are the kind that don’t fade. Bergman’s Ilsa is innocent  and yet has seen too much, sagged under the weight of the mistakes she’s made. Her beauty is ethereal, undeniable, but it’s her spirit and her will, dented though not broken, that beguiles us. She’s bewitching, and still she finds her match in Bogart, an actor renowned for his ability to play cynics ready with a quip and a cigarette. He deserves more attention for what he can do with his face, at once handsome and remote and amazingly expressive. Every time he says “here’s looking at you, kid,” those eyes make it different. Just as every time we see “Casablanca” it is different. It is never less incredible.

(Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait 10+ years to watch “Casablanca” again, discover it’s awesome and have to revise your Top 100 list. Again.)

C’est moi (in 10 movie facts)

Everyone’s friendly neighborhood Kaiderman and the ever-contemplative and sage Darren seem to have tagged me in the latest meme scuttling across the floor of our movie blogging underworld. And while I am duly honored, I do feel somewhat undeserving.

Mostly because I confess that I had no idea what the word “meme” meant.

And to think you call yourself an "English major"!

Then Merriam-Webster online came to the rescue and I tossed away that unsightly dumb-dumb cap and prepared to share 10 movie-related factoids about me:

1. “Gremlins” the movie scared me so badly I slept with my bedroom light on for a year. I’ve never seen the movie again, and throughout the Furbies craze I couldn’t pass one of those critters without shuddering.
2. The first movie I ever reviewed — for my high school newspaper, The Voice — was “Romeo + Juliet.” I gave it an “A.” Oh, to be that young and swoony and stupid again.
3. When we were 13, my cousin Katie and I decided to turn “Seaquest DSV” into a movie, wrote the script and sent it to NBC. Our talent so stunned them they were rendered totally incapable of writing back.
4. My friends call me The Walking Imdb because I can name a movie or an actor or a director with almost nothing to go on (my personal best: “that singer chick in that chick movie with the house” = “Foxfire”).
5. I go through random periods of mania where I get obsessed with a film and watch it until I have it memorized. Right now I’m stuck on “Casablanca.” Gin joints and hills of beans and all that.
6. I used to review movies for a small-town newspaper. The editors ran a mugshot with my column, and before long people started coming up to me in the grocery store/Walmart/the liquor store and say, “Hey, you’re that Movie Girl, aren’t you?”
7. My affinity for Mel Brooks comes from my parents, with whom I watch “Blazing Saddles” approximately 42 times per year.  It’s a bonding thing.
8. I haven’t found an eligible man yet who wasn’t disturbed by my preference for action films over chick flicks. (If you know any in the Carolinas, send them my URL.)
9. When I visited Boston a year ago, I jogged through the Common pretending I was Billy Costigan in “The Departed.” The homeless people looked at me funny.
10. The idea and the name for M. Carter @ the Movies came from my friend Jason, who needs to start his own blog. If the world can handle Two Girls One Cup, man, they can handle A Dick on Flicks.

And now, because this is a meme (see, Darren, I used the word properly!) that is akin to the Dread Cheese Touch, I must appoint five more fellow bloggers to tell their stories in 10 movie facts. They are:

• Go,See,Talk! — A dude with very eclectic taste in movies
• The Robot Who Likes Pretty Things — Possibly the most prolific reviewer I’ve never met
• FlixChatter — My go-to source for movie news
• The Film Reel — Whom I blame for getting me started on this horror craze I’m on
• Daily Film Dose — Whose diverse canon of reviews astounds me