Casablanca (1942)

1h 42m / PG / Drama VENUE: Historic Duncan Auditorium ****************************************** Casablanca lands so routinely in listings of the top two or three movies of all time, it’s become almost boring to call it great. It’s the definition of a Hollywood masterpiece. The scenes and the characters have taken on mythological lives of their own. But Casablanca manages to be strongly original while also synthesizing parts of many films of its time: a wartime setting, a hero with shades of grey in his past, a female lead who wants something she can’t have, humor and tragedy and parody and sacrifice. And, of course, doomed love. Although Casablanca was a big-budget film with established stars and first-rate writers, no one involved with its production expected it to stand out among the hundreds of pictures produced by Hollywood yearly. It was rushed into release to take advantage of the publicity from the Allied invasion of North Africa a few weeks earlier, and it had a healthy if not