Casablanca (1942)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Drama	Theatrical Trailer Featurette-Casablanca: You Must Remember This (36:45) Main Menu Audio & Animation
Rating
Year Of Production	1942
Running Time	98:27
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Michael Curtiz
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Humphrey Bogart Ingrid Bergman Paul Henreid Claude Rains Conrad Veidt Sydney Greenstreet Peter Lorre
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$36.95	Music	Max Steiner

    Casablanca is set in Casablanca, in non-occupied French Morocco during the Second World War. The setting lends itself to this type of story. Casablanca is a mysterious, exotic locale with a colourful rag-tag bunch of miscreants and refugees as inhabitants, many fleeing the Nazi war machine. The inhabitants of Casablanca can be divided into two camps; those desperate to get a visa so they can escape to America, and those that make their living from providing these visas by means fair or foul.

    Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is the cynical owner of Rick's Cafe Americain, a world-weary soul who "sticks his neck out for nobody". Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), one of the leaders of the underground movement in Europe, enters Casablanca, attempting to get to America. Rick has in his presumed possession some Letters of Transit which would guarantee safe passage to whomsoever carries these letters. Victor wants these letters and is willing to pay any price for them. But, there is a complication. Victor's wife, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) was previously involved with Rick, under tragic circumstances. Here we have a classic love triangle; two letters, three people that want the letters. What will Rick do?

    Throw into the melting pot a series of more-or-less shady characters, some excellent one-liners, and you have the cosmopolitan melting pot that is Casablanca.

Video

    This transfer is presented in the original 1.33:1 aspect ratio of the movie, in black and white. It is not 16x9 enhanced. I noted that the image was considerably windowboxed onto the 4:3 frame, so most people will see almost the entire image even if their display devices have considerable overscan.

    The sharpness of the transfer is quite variable, from remarkably sharp to very indistinct. Some of this could be put down to deliberate cinematography, such as the deliberately soft and grainy close-ups of Ingrid Bergman, but at other times the source material appears at fault. Shadow detail was very poor, reflective of the characteristics of film 50 years ago. Noise was problematic, with frequent shots suffering from copious amounts of grain. This is not a DVD that would be viewable on any large screen display device with any comfort.

    MPEG artefacting was where this transfer earned the nasty moniker. Put simply, the MPEG compression has been cranked up too high during this transfer, varying slightly around the 5 - 6 Mb/second range. As a result of this, the compression cannot handle the copious amounts of grain in the background of many shots, with marked and very noticeable macro-blocking evident in many backgrounds. It even intrudes into the foreground at times, particularly during close-ups of Ingrid Bergman, with many of her grainy close-up shots ruined by macro-blocking. The worst affected sequence is from 43:36 - 44:38 where the macro-blocking ruins what should be a beautiful, artful close-up shot.

    Film-to-video artefacts could be attributed to the excessive sharpening applied to this transfer. Whilst this is great when the picture is clear and static, as soon as any aliasing-prone movement happens on screen, the image shimmers markedly. Interestingly, the "usual suspects" for aliasing aren't the problem in this transfer since they didn't really exist in 1942. Instead, we see aliasing in wicker baskets, guitar strings, and on lines drawn on maps. The image frequently jumped about in quite a distracting fashion, in all directions, and sometimes the top half of the screen would jump and then the bottom half would follow suit - a most disconcerting effect. This was in addition to various single frames being dropped here and there.

    Film artefacts were extremely variable. Generally, they were remarkably absent. Occasionally, they intruded markedly into the image, such as as 8:18. There were two very nasty film artefacts at 32:04 and 32:09. In addition to a major loss in definition at these points, MPEG macro-blocking made these artefacts all the more noticeable. Vertical scratches were also evident in the image from time to time.

    This disc is a Dual Layered DVD. I did not detect a layer change during the movie itself, so I suspect that the extras are included on the second layer which is a gross waste of valuable compression space. This movie should have been compressed over two layers in order for it to have had a chance at an acceptable image.

Audio

    Dialogue was acceptable given the age of the source material. It was always clear and undistorted and was never out of sync. A word that Ingrid Bergman speaks has been removed at 43:57. You can clearly see her mouthe the word "nothing", but no audio accompanies her.

    The score by Max Steiner impeccably accompanies the movie, enhancing the mood where appropriate.

    The surround channels and subwoofer were not used.

Menu

Theatrical Trailer

Featurette - CASABLANCA: You Must Remember This

• 8 trailers for other Humphrey Bogart movies

    The video quality is dreadful at times, with unacceptable MPEG artefacting ruining what would otherwise have been an excellent disc.

    The audio quality is acceptable.

    The extras are reasonable.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall