The ultimate Hollywood romance. Bogart and Bergman at their finest and a superb cast of villains and heroes. Come on, get the DVD and play it again. Three Academy Award winner.
The lives and loves of various refugees, expatriates and soldiers as they pass through a nightclub run by cynical American Bogart in Casbalanca during World War 2, attempting to escape the conflict. Bogart's bitter worldview is shaken when his old lover walks into his gin joint out of all the others in the world.
A near-perfect film, more miraculous because it so easily could have become an ordinary film, one of dozens similar films churned out early in the war. Bogart and Bergman's romance is the stuff of legend now, but the real power of the film, at least to me, is apparent when you realize almost all of the actors in the film were Europeans, many of them Jews, who had either left Europe to avoid the Nazis, or had relatives still living in Europe (and this include many of those playing Nazis). So when you see them singing "La Marseillaise" in defiance of the Germans, the tears you see streaming down so many of their faces are real. That's the true heart of the film, which transcends it's propaganda message.