Casablanca. What can I, or anyone, write about this movie that hasn't been written a hundred times? That it's awful darn good? It is. You may have heard this is a very good motion picture. I must inform you that you heard correctly. Glad we had this talk.
The remarkable thing about Casablanca is how unremarkable its inception and production were. The Warner Brothers corporation, via its employees, picked up an unproduced stage play, rewrote it to be a little less stagebound, rewrote it several more times during production, slotted in some stars they figured could open well, and gave it a title that'd remind people of a different movie that had made a ton of money a couple years ago. They were going to write an original song to market along with the picture, but then Ingrid Bergman got a haircut at the wrong time, so they had to leave in "As Time Goes By". It was the usual studio-system round of compromises and cold-blooded business decisions. There was no singular vision, no driving purpose, no auteur.
Casablanca is a perfect film, a beautiful achievement of cinematic art unmatched by anything for decades after it. Some argue, convincingly, that it's never been equaled.
The two previous paragraphs should be in contradiction to each other, but they aren't. Casablanca was another product of the studio system, grinding out another likely box-office success, banking on the anti-Nazi trend since America entered the war and the best math Warner Brothers had available about what would sell tickets. That is completely true. Casablanca is also an immortal cinematic surprise, an unequaled anti-fascist masterpiece that only gains in relevance and importance with each passing decade, regardless of how many screenwriters did passes on it. That is also completely true.
The best analogy I can think of is that the studio system is like a machine that rolls a hundred dice at a time, hoping to get a high number, but knowing that the sheer number of dice means it'll likely get an acceptably average result. If you do that enough times, sooner or later every single die will come up six at the same moment. That's Casablanca.
What did this beat?
For Whom The Bell Tolls, Heaven Can Wait, The Human Comedy, In Which We Serve, Madame Curie, The More The Merrier, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Song Of Bernadette, and Watch On The Rhine. I've only seen a few of these, and none that could compare even remotely to Casablanca.