This article originally appeared in World War II magazine, vol. 29, no. 1 (May/June 2014):75-76. Reprinted with permission.
The first time I saw Casablanca I was twenty years old, with a
date on my arm and hope in my heart.
Unsurprisingly, I watched it through the lens of romance. So too, for at least the first five viewings,
should anyone watch this most beloved of American films. The journey of its central character, Rick Blaine
(Humphrey Bogart), from a deep bitterness about love at the beginning of Casablanca to a noble sacrifice of love
at its end, is one of the most compelling plots in the history of cinema. But after that, it is permissible to reflect
on Casablanca’s \political content, just as film critics have been doing for over
seventy years.
If
you have never seen Casablanca, then
stop reading this column, get hold of the DVD, and return after you’ve
watched it. The rest of us may reflect
on the film as it would have appeared to movie goers who saw it during its
initial run. Casablanca debuted at New York’s Hollywood Theater on Thanksgiving
Day 1942, not quite a year after the United States entered World War II. By February 1943 it was playing in over 200
theaters across the country.
At
one level, of course, Casablanca is indeed
an extraordinary romance. It centers on Rick’s Café Americaine, whose clientele
comes to drink, gamble, and attempt to buy and sell escape from Casablanca, in
French Morocco, to Lisbon in neutral Portugal and departure to freedom in the
New World. (French Morocco was then
under the control of Vichy France, the authoritarian, pro-German rump state
established after France signed a humiliating armistice with Germany.) Rick himself is hardened and bitter. It transpires that Rick has come from Paris,
where he loved and lost the beautiful Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). Then Ilsa suddenly appears in the company of
her seeming new lover, resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in
all the world,” Rick later glooms in a fog of liquor, “she walks into mine.”
Laszlo
is among those trying to escape to Lisbon, closely pursued by the menacing Nazi
Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). In
Casablanca Laszlo enjoys a fragile safety, because it is under the jurisdiction
of Vichy France. But Vichy is after all virtually
a German satellite, and sooner or later Strasser will find a way to seize
him. Laszlo is saved only because Rick
ultimately decides to discard his cynicism and, in an intricately planned
gambit, ensure Laszlo’s escape.
Few
could miss Casablanca’s references to
pre-war American foreign policy. Early in the film, Rick rebuffs an overture by
the black marketeer Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet) to go into business
together. “My dear Rick,” Ferrari
chides, “when will you realize that in this world today isolationism is no
longer a practical policy?” Warned by
the Vichy police prefect Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) not to intervene
on behalf of the weasel-like Ugarte (Peter Lorre), who is correctly suspected of
murdering two German couriers carrying letters of transit—priceless to anyone
seeking to flee Casablanca—Rick responds, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Renault observes, “A wise foreign policy.”
Based
upon those lines in the film, and its overall trajectory, some have theorized
that Warner Brothers intended Casablanca
as an argument in favor of American intervention in the war. But that is an untenable
interpretation. Filming began only until
May 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, and when the cameras started rolling
the script was still incomplete. Working
at white heat—screenwriter Howard Koch remembered feeling that “the camera was
a monster devouring my pages faster than I could write them”—Koch scarcely had
time to craft a subtle propaganda film.
And director Michael Curtiz scarcely had the intention: he simply wanted to make a love story.
But
as an affirmation of America’s goal
in going to war, which was nothing less than to save the world from evil, Casablanca had real power. It is established early on that Rick once
waged his own war against evil, running guns into Ethiopia and fighting in the
Spanish Civil War, acts redolent of America’s intervention against Imperial
Germany in World War I. But like
America, Rick retreated into a disillusioned isolationism: “I stick my neck out for nobody.”
Yet
despite Rick’s initial renunciation of any intent to stick his neck out for Laszlo in
Laszlo’s attempt to escape Strasser by flying to Lisbon with Ilsa (who turns
out to be his wife), by the end of the film
Rick has done exactly that, notwithstanding the fact that Ilsa is the great
love of his life. “Welcome back to the
fight,” Laszlo tells him. “This time I
know our side will win.” To protect
Laszlo and Ilsa from capture before the plane can lift off, Rick shoots
Strasser. Then, with the plane safely
aloft, Rick—joined by Renault, who evidently has also recovered his
idealism—walks off into the night to make his way to the Free French garrison
at Brazzaville: “Louis,” he says, in one
of cinema’s great lines, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful
friendship.” The arc of the film, then,
is an unmistakable journey from isolationism to intervention.
But
audiences would also have viewed Casablanca
in more personal terms. After
explaining to Ilsa why he has decided that she should leave with Laszlo rather
than remain with him, Rick continues, “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.”
Like Rick, millions of Americans were making a sacrifice on behalf of
the greater good, either by leaving their loved ones to go to war or by
watching their loved one depart. And if
by horrible chance the loved ones failed to re-unite, then, like Rick, they
could yet console themselves with their own equivalent of Rick’s declaration to
Ilsa: “We’ll always have Paris.”
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