Among The Best Films Ever Made

Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you
to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters?
We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.

Major Strasser: Are you one of those people
who cannot imagine the Germans in their beloved Paris?
Rick: It's not particularly my beloved Paris.
Heinz: Can you imagine us in London?
Rick: When you get there, ask me!
Captain Renault: Hmmh! Diplomatist!
Major Strasser: How about New York?
Rick: Well there are certain sections of New York,
Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.

--Casablanca, 1942

This is one of my all-time favorite films. Looking at it now, through eyes that are probably a bit too critical, I'm not unaware of its flaws - as well as the limitations of a directing style that has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Still, Casablanca will always be a classic, one of the top three films ever made, because it combines great writing, performances and a few directorial tricks that were ahead of its time.

The genius of the story jumps out at us from the caption of the opening insert. Released in 1942, the film's initial audience weren't all that different from an America reeling from 9/11. The Japanese secret attack on Pearl Harbor had rattled American illusions of isolation. While we now know of efforts, before the attack, to move the better part of the Pacific fleet, Pearl Harbor woke America up to dangers nobody had really conceived. In the space of a few hours, Japanese zeroes had devastated everything left to hit, using methods (torpedo bombs) nobody had ever seriously contemplated. Allied now with the Nazis and the Italian fascists, the Axis powers struck fear into the hearts of millions of Americans who now realized they were engaged in a life and death struggle with an enemy whose brutality could not be ignored.

If you remember the first scene in Waterworld, it begins with an animated representation of the Earth going blue as water overtakes every last corner of the globe. I'm convinced the idea for that technique comes from Casablanca, where the opening sequence shows Europe filling up with the black ink of Nazi conquest. Arrows show the panic of fleeing humanity. Everything in black is death. Everything in white is life.

With the Germans overrunning Europe - including France, whose pro-German Vichy government now controls the French protectorate of Morocco - the hideout of choice is Casablanca, at the very tip of French Morocco.

Or at least it was. With the arrival of Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), this wild-west-like refuge just across the Mediterranean is "under new management." The Vichy French government, represented by Capt. Renault (Claude Rains), is too weak and corrupt to be trusted with protecting the people of Casablanca. As an ally of the Germans, it can't be conquered twice, but it wouldn't think twice and rolling over for whatever the Germans want - including the names and identities of anyone the Germans deem an enemy of the state. With the need to flee again on everybody's mind, the coin of the realm is "letters of transport." With them, a soul might go anywhere the Nazis aren't. Without them, one is at the mercy of circumstance.

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is the owner of the local restaurant/bar/casino, "Rick's Place, a swanky Moroccan saloon full of decadence and deceit." As he tells the slippery Ugarte (Peter Lorre), "I stick my neck out for no man." That's prudent since tensions have just spiked. Two German couriers have just been mugged and murdered for "letters of transport." Of even greater concern, at least to the Nazis, is the impending arrival of Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Czech patriot whose logic and charisma have a tendency to inspire resistance. Smarting from his ability to outsmart them in Europe, the Nazis have come to Casablanca to make sure that Victor Laszlo never leaves. The stage is set for a game of cat and mouse.

And then it happens. As Rick is left to cry, "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine." Accompanying Laszlo, almost as his muse, is his wife, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), a woman of grace, style and charm. Rick should know. He and Ilsa have a shared history, a history Ilsa hasn't shared with Laszlo, a history that explains why Rick - whose causes once included running guns to Ethiopia, and fighting in Spain, "on the Loyalist side" - now wants no part of other people's business. Like the isolationist America whose experiences after "The Great War" were rocked by Pearl Harbor, Rick has been hiding out in Casablanca.

But the old days, of not taking sides, are about to end.

This is a great film, one I like to show in the classroom. It dramatizes the complex dilemmas of watching a world on fire and having to decide what you're willing to do to put the fire out. Casablanca, itself, is a playboy's paradise - like Havana on the eve of the Revolution - trying to close its eyes, and shut its ears, to the world outside. Its swaggering decadence ignores the human misery and desperation of huddled emigrees forced to negotiate and compete for scraps of hope. Everybody wants "letters of transport," but not everybody will get them. It's a situation bringing out different qualities in different people.

The most obvious of these is predation. Pickpockets and con artists are a dime a dozen. Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a shifty-eyed weasel, is chief among "the usual suspects" in the mugging and murder of those two Germans. Captain Renault (Claude Rains) is a bit more charming about it, but hardly less predatory. When a man and wife come to Casablanca, desperate for those "letters of transport," their luck in getting them may depend on whether the wife is good looking, and what she's willing to do for freedom. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is one step removed, as a rascal of sorts who doesn't mind turning a profit off of a captive audience but draws a line at outright exploitation. Stil, he's also a man who wears his neutrality on his sleeve. His response, to those who cry injustice, is to repeat his mantra: "I stick my neck out for nobody."

The real question is whether Rick can remain on the sidelines as trouble shows up at his door like "the pizza guy" eager to get his tip. Rick's gruff exterior suggests he will. But behind it, there's a core of decency, which is Capt. Renault suspects he's a "sentimentalist." The people he employees look like the morning shift at Schindler Industries. While the film never comes right out and calls them exiled Jews, screenwriters - Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch - have given them the fates of many Jews of the day. Bankers, lawyers, doctors and professors have found survival - as cooks, waiters, busboys and whatever else Rick can find them to do. Rick, it turns out, is what stands between sunrise and sunset.

But Rick is no longer interested in the role of the hero. He may have once been an idealist, like Victor Laszlo, whose survival in a concentration camp has steeled his determination to give his life for the cause. But having been burned - in a backstory involving Ilsa - he is determined not to get entangled again in any situation that doesn't directly involve his own interests. The only problem is that if he doesn't get involved, Ilsa and Victor will be left at the mercy of the Nazis. With his disappointments, bad blood with Ilsa, and maybe more than a little jealousy toward Victor, Casablanca becomes the arena for the moral choices of one man - and a whole generation.

I don't want to belabor the plot, especially for those who haven't seen it yet, even six decades after its theatrical run. Many will recognize it for its famous airport scene and Bogart's "hill of beans" speech: "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Bogart's famous monologue reflected the mass realization that dreams - and lives - were about to be irrevocably altered. In 1942, it didn't matter what you thought you were going to do with your life. After Pearl Harbor, all bets were off.

What makes this film so great is its mixture of the timely and the timeless. By '42, Americans had spent a decade watching the Nazis rise to power. They had digested hours of newsreels showing a ranting Adolf Hitler threatening to take over the world - and had then seen the pieces fall into place as, one by one, Hitler's war machine digested Europe. They had hoped to "sit this one out," a lesson they had concluded from the aftermath of World War I. With reports coming in of Japan's invasion of China - and the atrocities involved - few Americans were eager to get involved in a conflict that had already spilled over into Poland, France, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslavakia, Italy, Ethiopia, Algeria, Great Britain and the Far East.

But here it was, standing on their doorstep, not going away. And that's where Casablanca proves to be among the most timeless of films. This isn't just a story about Nazis, Vichy French and an American expatriate with a crisis of conscience. It's a story about moral choices, a love triangle, a dark comedy of sorts (if there could be such a thing in 1942) and a kind of political thriller. One of the great "feel good" moments of this film involves a kind of "battle of the bands" between obnoxiously-patriotic Germans and the misfit rank and file of Casablanca who respond with a rousing rendition of the Marcellaise. I still get goose bumps when I watch that scene, and it's more than six decades old.

Casablanca is also a product of its time that was sometimes ahead of its time. Choc full of great lines, the film also captures, in an "innocent" slip, the unwitting racism of 1940s Hollywood. There's a scene where Ingrid Bergman, whose Swedish features make her an angelic presence, stumbles into Rick's and spots Sam (Dooley Wilson), the piano-playing lounge singer who embodies the modern use of the word, "dog," because he's like a pet to Rick. Asking about him, Ilsa unapologetically asks about that "boy" over there. The idea of referring to a grown black man as a "boy," while revolting and outrageous today, was so common and acceptable in the 40s that Ilsa's character feels no sense of shame or consciousness about using the term. What's more, given her "angelic" role in the film, it's unlikely that audiences watching it during its theatrical run would have noticed anything out of the ordinary - a reminder that even the best products of 20th Century civilization have vestigial remainders of the racism we would later try to eschew.

In other ways, the film was ahead of its time. Arriving one year after the release of The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca has some interesting elements of film noir, even if the film is more likely to be classified as a drama, a romance or a political thriller. It begins with a pair of dead bodies (the Germn couriers killed for their letters of transport) and the mystery of who killed them. While the film does not involve a detective, Bogart - who played in some of the most famous of films noir - is caught up in the mystery, which is being investigated from various angles. Bogart employs the famous gumshoe hat and coat, smokes and drinks, alternately view Bergman as both a good girl and a femme fatale, and the lighting - at times - evokes the heavy symbolism of German expressionism (what an irony).

One of my favorite little "easter eggs" is the attempt to create the illusion of depth, even if the airfield shots are just props on a stage. To create a sense of activity and free the shot up from being too static, director Michael Curtiz wanted to show airmen and pilots in the background. The problem was scale. The "planes" in the background are miniaturized, in order to give a sense of distance. Had he shot the average adult walking around a plane, the planes would have looked like models - which they were. To fix that, Curtiz hired midgets, whose size still came off a little big for the dimensions but not so much that the average viewer would notice. It was a stroke of genius that proves the usefulness of every kind of actor.

Not everything in this film is equally inspired. Despite Robert McKee's insistence that this is the most perfect movie ever made, Casablanca does come up short here and there. Sometimes Curtiz's camera work, which was typical of the time, gives the viewer images that don't quite match up with the drama. For example, there are wide angle shots that might have been fine for establishing a location but which tend to under-serve the acting, especially in those scenes where the actor's facial expressions are critical. I also thought a certain flashback - after Isla's arrival - goes too far in showing us a backstory we could have gleaned from the dialogue. Some might argue that this sequence is useful because it shows us the early Rick, but for my money, it's too obvious. In fact, it makes Rick look pathetic.

In fact, Casablanca was not shot with any sense of its own destiny - that it would go on to become one of the most beloved films of all time. Warner Brothers had paid $20,000 for the move rights to Everybody Comes to Rick's, the most any studio had ever paid for the rights to an unproduced play. It was, however, an obvious from a marketing standpoint. While the original play was based on real-life observations from a 1938 trip to occupied France, and the tensions developing there, the story hit a nerve - in a frightened America - and Warner Brothers was quick to crank out a film to match the mood.

Michael Curtiz had neither the time nor the money to shoot this film as if it would be scrutinized for the next sixty years. In fact, there are continuing debates about how much of the plot he was privy to when he started shooting. That, if nothing else, makes the film all the more remarkable. Because of its theme - the choice between virtue and self-interest - Casablanca became an immediate hit. Few films have ever expressed, with such clarity, the zeitgeist of their time.

And of those who have, few have been as fun to go back to decades later. Even after watching this film a dozen times or more, I find my attitude toward it is best summed up by a line Rick delivers to Captain Renault: "Louis," he says, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."