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    "headline": "Kurt Russell and Michael Caine both call Casablanca the greatest film; how it ranks in critics’ polls",
    "description": "Caine first saw the Bogart classic at age nine. The American Film Institute ranks it third of all time, but the 2022 BFI critics' poll left it out of its top 10.",
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    "articleSection": "Entertainment",
    "keywords": "Casablanca, Classic films, Humphrey Bogart, Kurt Russell, Michael Caine",
    "articleBody": "Michael Caine’s verdict on Casablanca has held for more than eight decades. Introducing the 1942 Humphrey Bogart film at a Grand Classics screening at the Electric cinema in London, the two-time Oscar winner told the audience that even as a boy he “thought this is one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. And, to this day, it still is.” Kurt Russell went further. Asked to name his favorite film for entertainment writer Cindy Pearlman’s 2007 book You Gotta See This, which collected picks from more than 100 actors, writers and directors, he chose Casablanca. He called it the most emotionally satisfying movie ever made, credited it with the best dialogue of any film and the greatest screen romance, and admitted he is unable to switch it off: whenever it turns up on television, he stays for the whole thing. Neither remark is new. The two comments have been shared together online this week as if the actors had compared notes, but they were made separately, years apart, and Badiyaa found no recent interview in which either man returned to the subject. What the pairing does offer is a fair test. Two working actors, one British and one American, born 18 years apart, landed on the same 84-year-old picture. How does their choice stack up against the critics and the industry? Two fans who met the film as children Caine was born Maurice Micklewhite in London in March 1933, so he was nine when Casablanca premiered in New York on November 26, 1942. It reached general US release on January 23, 1943. In the same screening introduction he said Bogart “was, and still is my favourite actor of all time”, and the attachment shows in his name. Needing a new stage name in 1954, he spotted The Caine Mutiny, a Bogart picture showing at the Odeon in Leicester Square, and borrowed it. Russell arrived more than eight years after that premiere, on March 17, 1951, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He grew up inside the studio system of a later era, as a Disney contract player in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), before his run of John Carpenter films: Escape from New York, The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. His habit of getting stuck with Casablanca on TV fits the record. By 1977 it was the film broadcast most often on American television. What the two actors are praising Michael Curtiz directed the film for Warner Bros., with Bogart as Rick Blaine, an American who runs a nightclub in Vichy-run Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman as his former lover Ilsa Lund and Paul Henreid as her husband, the Czechoslovak resistance leader Victor Laszlo. The source was Everybody Comes to Rick’s, a play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison that never reached the stage. Shooting ran from May 25 to August 3, 1942, almost all of it on the Burbank lot, and the production finished $75,000 over budget at $1,039,000. Its first American run was a solid hit rather than a sensation, earning $3.7 million. Studio records later put the take at $3,398,000 at home and $3,461,000 abroad, close to $6.9 million combined, or roughly 6.6 times what it cost. The Academy then gave it best picture, best director for Curtiz and best adapted screenplay for Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. In 1989 the Library of Congress placed it in the first class of films chosen for the National Film Registry. How the polls compare On the American industry’s own scorecard, Russell and Caine are close to consensus. The American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Movies list, built from a poll of more than 1,500 artists and industry leaders, ranked Casablanca second in 1998, behind only Citizen Kane. When the institute updated the list in 2007, it slipped one place to third as The Godfather climbed to second. International critics are cooler. The British Film Institute’s once-a-decade greatest films poll gathered votes from 1,639 critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics in 2022, and Casablanca did not make its top 10. First place went to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) with 215 votes, ahead of Vertigo and Citizen Kane. A parallel poll of 480 directors, topped by 2001: A Space Odyssey, also left it out of the top 10. Reviewers taken one at a time are kinder: 99% of the 136 reviews counted by one aggregator are positive, and another gives it a perfect 100. Dissenters do exist. Pauline Kael wrote that it was “far from a great film”, and Umberto Eco called it “a very mediocre film” by strict critical standards before granting it “Homeric depths”. Even Roger Ebert, a devotee, conceded in 1992: “There are greater movies.” The film turns 84 on November 26. Its US copyright runs out at the end of 2037, and Casablanca is due to enter the American public domain on January 1, 2038.",
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