Was that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?

Casablanca is one of the usual suspects. You know what I mean. The Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai, North by Northwest, 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know the type, the films that you can expect to see on top of critics’ lists. The movies that film classes glorify. And not without cause. But while I find each of these films impressive in its own way, Casablanca is one of the only two I really like (I’ll let you guess the other one). And Casablanca, more than any of the others, has entered our collective culture. No one would have been more surprised by this legacy than the movie’s makers, who overcame a miserly budget and an unfinished script to produce what they hoped would be a decent flick.


The Story

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) runs Rick’s Café Americain, the hottest spot in WWII Casablanca. On the fringe of the war the French Moroccan city sees all types, especially those trying to flee Nazi Germany and Vichy France. And many of them do their black market business at Rick’s, under cover of the roulette wheel and jazz music. Captain Renault (Claude Rains) runs the city, struggling to keep it his own despite having to toady to his German guest Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). Renault knows full well what goes on in Rick’s, but ignores it as long as he keeps winning at roulette, and as long as Rick studiously keeps out of ‘politics.’

Enter Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a known member of the resistance who Strasser badly wants to keep from fleeing to Portugal. With him comes his wife Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and when the Laszlos venture into Rick’s it’s clear she and Rick have met before. In fact, theirs was more than a passing acquaintance, and Ilsa’s arrival shatters the bitter cynicism Rick has used as a shield since she last broke his heart.

As Renault and Strasser make things ever less comfortable for the Laszlos, Rick becomes the only chance they have for escape. But old flames make for a thorny love triangle, and the question is, who will stay and who will go?


Reactions and Recommendation

Casablanca is an unassuming film, and this may well be the secret of its enduring success. Because audiences approach classics like this with a certain degree of trepidation. Knowing we’re supposed to be impressed we may be inclined to dig in our heels and resist. It’s easy to look for the things that make the movie great, instead of simply enjoying it. Doing so, we often set ourselves up to be disappointed. This love/hate attitude toward classics has kept me from Casablanca until now. After all, our culture is bedeviled with quotes from the film. How could it not seem clichéd?

Rick’s exaggerated cynicism seemed to confirm my fears. Hard-boiled characters hardly interest me, and are usually only saved when their shell gets cracked. But what saves Rick, and Casablanca itself, isn’t when he becomes likeable. It’s when he makes good on his promise not to stick his neck out for nobody, refusing to intervene when a character who has mildly amused us is taken to his death. This show of true hardness doesn’t sit easy—audiences are supposed to like the protagonist. It’s a daring move that allowed me to finally buy into Rick’s toughness. Complicating the character this way paid off: instead of being annoying and trite, the predictable revelations of a heroic past and a broken heart were gratifying.

Rick’s exaggerated cynicism is more than bathetic precisely because it’s supposed to be affected. It’s clear he’s a man trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t believe in his heart. Beneath the cynicism we see bitterness, a reaction to an anguish that extinguished, or at least buried, an earlier nobility. When we understand the trigger of that anguish, when we see Rick standing alone in the rain at the train station, looking as if his insides had been kicked out, we empathize and not only overlook his bitterness, but begin to share it. At least I did. And that may say something about me, but I doubt I’m the only one who thought Ilsa deserved the cruel treatment Rick gives her when she shows up in his club.

Of course, Bogart and Bergman deserve credit for the dynamic between their two characters. Though Bergman usually leaves me only mildly impressed, here she does very well portraying the uncertainty of Ilsa’s position. She’s anxious for her husband’s safety, but torn by remembered feelings for Rick. It’s nice to speculate that some of this nuance stems from Bergman’s not being told whether Ilsa leaves Laszlo for Rick until most of the filming was over.

But it’s Bogart who carries the movie, and the role defines his career. While Bogart gives the character the expected Sam Spade kind of hardness, what’s remarkable is his accomplishing the already described delicacy of the role. Among the rest of the cast, Claude Rains’s Captain Renault is delightfully devilish, the kind of fiend you find yourself forgiving for the sake of his entertainment value. Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo is somewhat disappointing, but a degree of stiffness may be appropriate to the role. The strange circumstance that he and Rick should be in love with the same woman is highlighted by the contrast in their coping strategies.

The bit players are also good, from the mercurial Ferrari to the earnest Carl and lascivious Sascha, who, it turns out, puts his pocketbook first. Most memorable is Dooley Wilson as Sam the piano man, whose “As Time Goes By” is the blade Rick and Ilsa torture themselves with. But it’s Sam’s jazzier music that creates the general atmosphere at Rick’s club, along with the vignettes of sundry wheeling and dealing.

Perhaps it’s the minimalist in me, but I think the strength of Casablanca’s acting reflects the leanness of its script. Not much happens in this story, and the characters don’t tend to be chatty. Which makes the payoffs that much more effective. The ratio of quotables to filler lines is higher than anything else I’ve seen, and the quality of those quotables is seen in the mark they’ve made in our culture. I’ll spare you the recitations.

The sets and costumes are all nice, and the cinematography, directing and editing are worth discussing. But it’s the acting and story that drives this film. Unlike Citizen Kane, the other movie most often called best of all time, there is no arty archness here, no exorbitantly self-conscious attention to technique. Again, it’s this very unassuming quality that makes Casablanca so successful. Its lack of pretension allows its audience to take its story seriously on a simple level, without fretting about whether what they’re seeing is best described as postmodern or deconstructive.

And at that simple level what Casablanca presents is a powerful moral dilemma in the tradition of tales of soldiers who return to find that their wives, believing themselves widowed, have remarried. And while the final resolution of the Rick-Ilsa-Laszlo love triangle is arguably too neat (I don’t think so), the treatment is real and true. How should Laszlo feel, finding that his wife had a romance when she believed him dead? How should Rick feel, finding that the reason Ilsa ran out on him was that she discovered her husband wasn’t dead after all? And most of all, how should Ilsa feel, seeing the partitions separating these portions of her life break down? What outcome should each character want and what are they willing to sacrifice to get it?

The cleverest tack taken is the application of a parallelism. A young Bulgarian couple is trying to flee to Portugal. They can’t afford the necessary bribe, but Renault, whose heart is his least vulnerable spot, suggests to the pretty wife an alternative method of payment. She asks Rick’s advice and he’s sickened by the situation. Soon enough, he and Ilsa and Laszlo are all asking themselves similar questions: would they be justified in betraying their love in order to save their loved one?

Instead of seeming insignificant in the context of world war, the dilemmas of these three little people are made important. So don’t let Casablanca’s importance to film dissuade you like it did me. Because what’s ultimately important to Casablance isn’t film, it’s what’s important to the average you and me.


– Panguitch


(Bonus points for whoever can find the most references to lines from the movie.)


See Ingrid Bergman team with Cary Grant for the chronically flawed Indiscreet: http://www.epinions.com/content_129324912260