If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then
it is no mystery that “Casablanca” is one of the most popular films ever made.
It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a
higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to
imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly
renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.
No one making “Casablanca” thought they were making a great
movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an “A list” picture,
to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of
supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter
Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on
a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the
film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar
circumstances, and the greatness of “Casablanca” was largely the result of
happy chance.
The
screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of
scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have
helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the
writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors
that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.
Humphrey
Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as
the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in “The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre,” convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In “Casablanca,”
he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in
Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the
French Resistance.
The
opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the
weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt
world. “What is your nationality?” the German Strasser asks him, and he
replies, “I’m a drunkard.” His personal code: “I stick my neck out for nobody.”
Then
“of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under
the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she
abandoned him–left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their
tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero
of the French Resistance.
All
this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many
viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar’s
piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see
her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, “As Time
Goes By.” He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of
the back room (“I thought I told you never to play that song!”). Then he sees
Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in
resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not
as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time
you see the movie you don’t yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris;
indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)
The
plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will
allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained
the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The
sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his
carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her
story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick
wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence
that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought
together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo
escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get
away with murder. (“Round up the usual suspects.”)
What
is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical,
some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to
renounce his love for Ilsa–to place a higher value on Laszlo’s fight against
Nazism–remember Forster’s famous comment, “If I were forced to choose between
my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.”
From
a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund’s
role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie’s real
question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no
reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca
with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered.
But that would be all wrong; the “happy” ending would be tarnished by
self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach
nobility (“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”). And it allows us,
vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the
glow of his heroism.
In
her closeups during this scene, Bergman’s face reflects confusing emotions. And
well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the
film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman
played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the
subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she
could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.
Stylistically,
the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of
Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers
(Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of
their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in
a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters
(Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as
the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who
will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of
the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as “Havana,” Hollywood
practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford
and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were
more lovers than heroes.
Seeing
the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows
over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the
more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would.
The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of
the emotional effect of “Casablanca” is achieved by indirection; as we leave
the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world
from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all
amount to more than a hill of beans.
