CASABLANCA @ 80

A montage lets us know that it's 1941 and the Nazis are getting crazy again but no one wants to play so they run in all directions except the bad one. Some of them find a place and settle but most end up somewhere like this place, remote, venal, politically uncertain, all those things that a refugee could really want. We open in a marketplace dominated by the newcomers who try to buy their passage to America and, guess what, it's a seller's world. Losing count of the deals and many faces of human aspiration, we are taken as rapidly through this undeclared Hunger Games of manners.

The opening of Casablanca is a wonder of choreography, so perfectly judged and finely crafted that even detail hound cinema students like me when I first saw it - who could confidently name the lens types Gregg Toland used for any given setup in Citizen Kane - let all that fall to the floor and just watched. 

There's plenty of expository dialogue but it's couched in the barb and the wink of the deal. All of life, such as it has become for these stateless people, is here in the noise of raw retail. We are not surprised when the earnest local warns the soft British tourists of the dangers of the locals as he picks their pockets. Then in a different location we witness the amiable reception of a visiting Nazi by the local police chief who makes it plain that local law and order is a process of pragmatism served up for the wit of the gendarmerie.

That night everyone goes to Rick's. The whimper-voiced Ugarte takes to Rick himself. Ugarte has things more valuable than money for Rick to caretake for a take while the deal matures. Goes bad. Around them a superficially more refined version of the stinky marketplace rolls on with ever more folly observed with wisecracks. We first think the worst and then the best of Rick by a deed following a lack of deed. Life in Casablanca suits him. It's everyone's problems not his.

And then she turns up. From a long delayed tale of a past that the war interrupted, she too has fled like everybody else and, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she has walked into his. Ilsa, who is instantly recognised by Sam the piano man and who instantly recognises him and asks him to play that song about time going by. Time stops, just for a little, as the suave melody rises though the cigarette haze and into the ears of Rick who gets up to rage at Sam until he gets there and sees her. The world stops. It's really her. Married, actually. To the famous fugitive freedom fighter. Everything feels too strong and the night is still blushingly young.

Michael Curtiz' movie has come down the decades more beloved than Kane, more grown up than Wonderful Life, easier on the attention span than Potemkin. An oldie that the youngest love, enamoured of both cynics and romantics ... its really easy to do this. But it's also easy to see why this one draws its masses of platitudes and it has less to do with expert or virtuous film making. There are creaks here and corndogs there all over the shop that wouldn't pass the cut in noirs made for half the cost but the point is not in the lap dissolves or the often forced goodness of the messianic Lazlo who seems essential for the whole world's sake to clear it of nazis.

It is in the central love story between Rick and Ilsa and it is in the complications that make that story impossible or at the worst, defeatingly cruel. For the audiences of 1942 the high stakes would put the prospect of a show of humaneness at some distance behind the satisfaction of a tight struggle and punishing blow to the black hats. But we just don't feel that as we watch, we want the goodness more than anything and we want, having become acquainted with their vulnerability, all the refugees to rest in real homes. And when the barking nazi anthem gets drowned out by the rest of the world singing La Marsellaise we struggle to breathe for the intensity of it. And we see the kind of nobility that we never expect of our politics rise to triumph. And by all the circles of hell we wish we lived in such a world ourselves.

If only a Rick made of a Humphrey Bogart at his hard boiled peak could stand amongst us. If we had the example of the insanely photogenic Ingrid Bergman to show us that the toughest intellect can be no match for the heart's tug o' war. Well, we've all already met the Chief Louis Renault, whose way with a silky barb would stay with us after we shot him for his eelish self-service. But that's the thing, the most romantic terms fall off these characters as, for all the romance of their situations, they do act as they might if real, or at least how we wish we ourselves would act.

The quote section for this one over at the IMDB goes for screens, including almost all the dialogue. It's a talky film. But as witty as it gets (very) the wit itself is measured and appropriately assigned. Rick's deadpan wisecracks are rougher than Louis' Wildean bon mots. Isla's earnestness forbids jokes but her warmth comes through and in the midst of her gravity she manages the genuine eroticism of: "Kiss me as if it were for the last time."

It works because it takes no imagination to link the hill of beans problems Rick mentions and those of the wider world racked by a Hitler to the issues of any time since its release deep in the middle of the war years. It works because it makes us feel as good as we do when we understand that the grownups recognise the crap we're going through and manage to croak out something perfectly formed and healing. When I first saw it, in the days of old movies on prime time on the commercial channels and themed movie marathons that went from midnight to dawn, offering an education supplement I will never cease to be thankful for, in a Brisbane pressed down by a party political police force as much as it was by the humidity. And I thrilled and understood. The next morning brought the same Bjelke Brisbane in through the windows but I had a new song to whistle on the way to the busstop.