Written for 1940s Week hosted by An Old Fashioned Girl. ❤
For at least 15 years I held off on watching Casablanca. It's one of my parents' favorite movies, my dad's especially, but I never really appreciated or even liked Humphrey Bogart until just a couple of years ago and even then I limited myself to his films with Lauren Bacall. Casablanca just was not on my radar, at least, not until a few weeks ago when my folks talked me into watching it with them.
It utterly enthralled me.
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Some movies you watch once and that's more than enough, or you may watch it again, but only because it's entertaining or fun for one reason or another. Casablanca is both of these and yet neither. It is . . . eternal, overflowing with dilemmas and heartaches that are relevant no matter the era. If a film could ever be called timeless, it is Casablanca.I was hardly 1/2 an hour into watching it before ideas and thoughts started jumping around in my head regarding the ramifications of the moral choices made by these characters. Oh my goodness, it can be so HARD to do the right thing! I know that I've felt it and I'm sure all of you have felt that pull towards the "dark side," sometimes giving in and sometimes resisting poor moral choices. It's a part of the human condition brought on by sin.
So you have Humphrey Bogart's character, Rick Blaine. He's embittered by past disappointments and runs an Americana nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco in an attempt to what? Forget. Maybe, but it can be any one of a number of different reasons why he's gone so far away from what most Americans would consider a normal life. He’s running from his past, not because he was a criminal or anything like that, but because of memories.