Casablanca

The Brattle has timed Casablanca's reshowing wisely; the picture was filmed back in Humphrey Bogart's prime, and before Ingrid Bergman became an untouchable to the gossip-columnist caste. Just now, however, the temperers of public sentiment have shed tears for the late, great Bogie, because he is dead; and Miss Bergman is living her renaissance.

Most of the people who will jam the Brattle for the next two weeks have seen Casablanca at least once, and will see it once again not because they remember the complex plot of intrigue and love and compromised virtue, but because each actor made his character indelible.

Rick's Cafe Americain, whose proprietor wears a white dinner jacket, speaks with a faint lisp, and drinks a great deal when unhappy, sports an odd assortment of minor characters; they are bit parts, from which the actors have squeezed everything. Fat Sidney Greenstreet, with fez, is Farrari, the jovial "leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca." Peter Lorre is a funny, intense worm who sells blackmarket visas to refugees stranded in the unoccupied French city; the producers could afford to lead him off screaming after fifteen minutes: but in that time he created a lasting figure.

Claude Rains, as the wary French Prefect of Police, a "poor, corrupt official" who must work with the Gestapo, cannot decide whether French or German grass is greener, and so sits between on a sharp picket fence. As Victor Laslo, Paul Henreid plays a leader of various resistance movements who has eluded the Germans once too often; his acting shows what a man tortured in a concentration camp must endure.

In a time when the cute, effervescent sparkle of a Debbie Reynolds type has replaced more mature beauty, Ingrid Bergman makes you see how very few striking actresses are left. The camera looks closely at her for long, half-minute stretches; her voice and her face convey great emotion; there may be no other actress who can fill brief scenes with quite so much feeling.

Rick has spent his mercenary time running guns to doomed Ethiopia, and fighting, a la Hemingway, with the lost Spanish Loyalists; the romantic's romantic character, someone you would be if you could not, he is haunted by memories of Paris and a very beautiful woman. Bogart is superb.

All of which could compose a solid, bottom-of-the-barrel melodrama. The plot runs along smoothly, but is not better than most plots. The actors have choice lines much of the time, but they must also bring off some pretty shoddy writing: "kiss me Richard; kiss me as if it were the last time." The film is raised to the level of superlative, escapism entertainment because fine acting gives an indifferent story meaning beyond its worth; there are no second rate performances. Casablanca is an artificial world, where people who are not people are ideal though heroes, or murderers, or females, all leading dreams-of-glory existences: but the artificial world and the ideal characters are fascinating, absorbing and alive; so escape becomes exciting, satisfying reality.