The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
84. 1942 - Casablanca
Honourable Mentions: Cat People, The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Miniver
There's an argument to be made that Michael Curtiz's Casablanca is the most iconic film ever made.
It counted among its leads the defining actor of Hollywood's wartime and post-war era, Humphrey Bogart, as well as one of its most glamorous and acclaimed actresses in Ingrid Bergman, the pair fashioning an onscreen connection compelling enough to equal the one Bogey forged with real-life partner Lauren Bacall across the likes of To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Key Largo. Add to that the likes of Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet, and you're left with a film that boasts some of the most recognisable and animated faces ever put to screen.
But Casablanca's importance goes beyond its assemblage of such a treasure trove of acting talent. A wartime production developed by Warner Bros. during the burgeoning months of America's entry into the Second World War, Curtiz's film defined a moment in popular culture and of national sentiment, as isolationist feeling suddenly and violently gave way to dutiful sacrifice and resilience in the acrid shadow of Pearl Harbor.
Most fascinating, however, is how it also cast a watchful eye to the past, highlighting the cost of ignorance and self-preservation through Bogart's character of Rick, before shifting to the future to intimate the long, arduous road that lay ahead for many Americans, amplified in turn by so many of the non-Hollywood cast being comprised of European actors who had fled the Nazis as they strolled through the continent.
Like the very best of World War II cinema, there's a profound, unceasing weight to Casablanca, a film that is today best remembered for exemplifying an era of stardom, but whose depths extend to something much more profound.