An entertaining adventure story played against the colorful background of the cosmopolitan city that has become an important stop on the timetable of the European refugee.
The reason Casablanca endures is that it's a timeless love story wrapped inside a gripping wartime thriller, written with such wit and meaning that it's still quoted (and misquoted) decades later.
Curtiz's film is a classic for a reason -- it's crafted with the precision, detail and beauty of a Fabergé egg; the dialogue is hauntingly memorable and, in Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, it has one of the most magnetic screen pairings in history.
There are some of the very finest character actors that Warner Brothers could muster and a rich, detailed screenplay studded with an indecent number of sparklingly quotable lines. It is a movie to play again, and again.
The film's tensions, sexual and dramatic, derive from the ambiguity of characters' motives. We can never be too sure about Rick and Renault until the final fadeout.
