Casablanca

I just watched Casablanca, again, and I am reminded of what a great and timeless movie it is. I remember it was one of the first movies I ever watched in black and white. The first time I saw it I was confused, without color I had difficulty telling the characters apart. The second time I watched the Turner colorized version. At 12 it helped me keep the characters straight, but now I realize that it is sacrilege colorizing black and white movies and I hope Ted Turner burned all of his colorized monstrosities.

Today someone getting into Casablanca can have great difficulties. Not the story, boy meets girl, boy loses girl is a timeless story. The problem is twofold. One, we are far removed from the events of World War II and have greater difficulty understanding the relationship between US isolationism, Nazi Germany aggression, Vichy France capitulation, and the myriad of smaller nations engulfed in the events of the Second World War that each of the characters represent. Second, with the mystique surrounding the film, the dialogue has become so cliche and the characters too cool to be believed that it is difficult to get past all of this to enjoy the movie for what it initially was, a good movie.

What has to be kept in mind is that this movie is well worth the investment of energy. It is a study of some interesting characters, a showdown between good and evil, a love story, and in certain respects a war movie. Suspend disbelief and realize that this film was the first place that ‘Here’s looking at you kid,’ ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ and ‘This could be the start of a beautiful friendship’ were ever used.

Casablanca tells the story of an American named Rick, a quintessential Humphrey Bogart tough guy, who runs a popular bar in the city of Casablanca. Rick is a cool customer; he ran guns and fought on the wrong side of the Spanish Civil War. He never gambles though he runs illegal gambling in his bar, he never drinks though he sells the stuff, and he never falls for a woman though they all fall for him. Because of a past romantic hurt Rick has spent years putting up walls and distancing himself from the people around him. Into his bar walk Ilsa Lund and her husband Victor Lazlo, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the world she has to walk into mine.’ Victor is a Czech resistance leader and the Nazi officials put pressure on the Vichy government to keep him and his wife from ever leaving Casablanca. There is a muddled plot beginning with two letters of transit that will allow two people to leave Casablanca no questions asked. How Peter Lorre acquired these is alluded to at the beginning and there is some shooting over them, but needless to say Rick ends up with them and suddenly becomes the most popular man in Casablanca. It turns out that Ilsa the love his lost in Paris at the beginning of the war and she spends the rest of the movie vacillating between trying to kill him to get the letters of transit for her husband and making love to Rick, ostensibly for the same purpose.

Because of the imposition of the Hays Code at the time the movie is not graphic and much of the relationship between Rick and Ilsa is only hinted at. Since she thought that her husband was dead when she met Rick she is not guilty of any true evil and thus the film rules that bad people must be punished does not apply. It is interesting to see that many of the grittier subjects were not left out of mainstream films, but that they were alluded to in such a vague way that, though viewers at the time new what to look for, today’s viewer is not equipped to understand some of the implied actions. Here it is not so bad, when the camera pans to a shot of the moon, we know people are having sex. There are a number of movies at this time, notably The Big Sleep, another Bogart film, that are so obscured as to make them nearly unintelligible. Taboo subject like drug use, affairs, suicide, and murder are hinted at in such a roundabout fashion they muddle the film.

Rick is the example of American isolationism at the start of the Second World War and his distance from the rest of the characters is slowly eroded until he must take an active role and determine the fates of the other people, countries, in much the same America came to the aid of its Western allies following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Thus Casablanca is really a morality play, with each character representing a point of view on the war and all of their actions leading to their eventual involvement on either the good or the evil side of the struggle. What comes from all of this is a polished film from the time when men wore hats and stood when women left the table. This film stands the test of time because of its strong characters, universal themes, and excellent script and acting.