“Round Up the Usual Suspects”

It was appropriate on this Valentine’s Day to see Warner Brothers 1942 classic Casablanca for the umpteenth time. As TV host Ben Mankiewicz said when he introduced the film for tonight’s Turner Classic Movies (TCM) showing, it was the most perfect film produced by the Hollywood studio system.

As a love story, one is not sure until the end whether Rick (Humphrey Bogart) will give the letters of transit for Lisbon to Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) and his wife Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). And will Captain Renaud (Claude Rains) arrest Rick and turn him over to Major Strasser of the Third Reich (Conrad Veidt)?

I have seen Casablanca so many times in my life that it is almost like Holy Writ. Even when Ilsa Lund pleads, “Victor, please don’t go to the underground meeting tonight,” I forgive the clunky line because it is an integral part of a film that I love as is. I even like all the recurrences of “Here’s looking at you kid.”

Sometimes I think one of the things that makes the film great are all the actors from Mitteleuropa that were in the cast, including Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Leonid Kinsky, S. Z. Sakall, Ludwig Stössel, Hans Heinrich von Twardowsky, Trude Berliner, Ilka Grünig, and Wolfgang Zilzer. And don’t forget Hungarian director Michael Curtiz and Austrian music director Max Steiner. It gives the whole “stuck refugee” theme a major boost, with the daily plane to Lisbon and freedom as its ultimate desideratum.