Casablanca AKA Holy Carp, There are Nazi in this movie!

Casablanca is one of those movies I must of avoided for YEARS because I have a distaste for most sappy romance. You could say they disagree with my constitution, and what could be worse than the supposed
'Greatest Romance Ever Told?"

 

    Are they going to kiss? Ewwwww...

So sometime in my senior year of high school I got stubborn. I WOULD watch this movie, even if it made me physically ill. The result surprised me.

This movie was GOOD.

And it had NAZIS.

This movie has been misrepresented for decades. This is not a movie about remembering an ill-fated romance, this a movie of a bitter man resigned to rot away in a hellhole filled with Nazis while the one love of his life comes back to exploit him one last time. Oh, and this one guy ESCAPES A CONCENTRATION CAMP.

 

Eat your heart out Great Escape.

It's sort of underplayed in the movie, but Victor Laszlo, the third wheel in our love tricycle, not only manages to break out of a Nazi concentration camp, but he also has been on the run for months, confounding his pursuers at every turn. This guy is a badass. And he has a hot wife.

Humphrey Bogart is on the other side of that gun.

Humphrey Bogart broke out as a romantic lead thanks in part to this movie. Before this he played thugs and hard-boiled detective types. (I'll get to The Maltese Falcon on a later date.) He spends about 70% of this movie brooding in badly-lite rooms drinking gin.

Information was carefully researched by a crack team of me.

Casablanca has the boon of co-starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. These guys are probably the best thing to ever happen to Film Noir. They appeared in about 8 films together, all of them Noir. Hell, they're only in this movie for a combined 5 minutes, they're never on screen together, Lorre dies about 10 minutes in and these two are STILL awesome. Of course I am notorious for watching any shitty movie if it has Peter Lorre in it.

 

This movie is pretty terrible, but this and Joe E. Brown doing cartwheels makes it worth it.

The city of Casablanca....well, sucks. It is full of tourists, Nazis, pickpockets, fugitives and rogue Peter Lorres.

He's a bartender. Among other things.

                        There is something between these two, I swear to God. Also, yes that is the invisible man.
 
I am not going to talk about the ending. You've probably seen it. Or a parody of it. It's a good ending.

I must have seen this scene a half dozen different ways by the time I was 9.

This movie has become one of my favorite moves ever. If it comes on TV, life stops. Everything can wait, Casablanca is on. Its amazing I can accomplish anything now that I have it on DVD.

 

Who needs college classes?