Casablanca’s theme of decency amid disillusion still pertains

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This article was published 08/11/2024 (365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Here’s looking at you, kid.” “Round up the usual suspects.” “We’ll always have Paris.”

Casablanca, the 1942 movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as Rick and Ilsa, former lovers who reunite in wartime French Morocco, is packed with phrases so familiar they are recognized even by people who’ve never seen the film.

Because Casablanca seems like such an iconic example of classic old Hollywood, because it’s covered in such a gorgeous gauze of black-and-white nostalgia, it’s easy to forget there are sharp edges of relevance to the story.

And because so many of the film’s most iconic images show the central couple embracing — Bogey in his trench coat and fedora, Bergman haloed in soft light — Casablanca is often recalled as a love story, a tale of passion and longing and regret.

But it’s essentially a war movie, something to think about as we approach Remembrance Day.

In Casablanca, director Michael Curtiz and scripters Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard E. Koch delivered one of the most effective “why we fight” films of the Second World War. It’s effective precisely because it doesn’t feel like a message movie. With its star power, snappy scripting and stylish atmosphere, Casablanca works as a potent mix of propaganda, popular entertainment and cinematic art.

Rick, an American bar owner who’s a cynical romantic — or maybe a romantic cynic — is surviving in Casablanca, which is controlled by the Vichy French in a queasy alliance with the Nazis. Everything is a transaction in this town, where desperate refugees wait, hoping to make passage to America, surrounded by corruption and extortion, grifters and thugs.

Rick claims to be neutral about the war. He claims it so many times, in fact, we begin to suspect it’s not true. And we get a chance to test Rick’s true moral character when Ilsa arrives in Casablanca with her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Czech resistance leader and anti-fascist.

Casablanca is an unusual kind of war film. Though there are life-and-death stakes for almost everyone on screen — and one or two gunshots fired — there is no combat. The closest we get to a battle is a scene involving some very intense singing: German officers are joining in a militaristic song when a roomful of refugees rise to drown them out with the French national anthem and shouts of “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!”

This scene gets its dramatic power and emotional effect from the fact many of the actors playing these refugees from Nazi persecution were, in fact, actual refugees from Nazi persecution, living in exile in Hollywood. And they were finally getting the chance to express their defiance and their desperate hope.

Until 1942, the American film industry had mostly reflected the isolationist position popular in American society at large. The script for Casablanca, according to the film’s origin story, just happened to be on top of a pile of scripts at the Warner Bros. studio on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Rick’s transformation from an isolationist who “sticks his neck out for nobody” to a man who commits to the collective fight against fascism is viewed by critics and film historians as a metaphor for America entering the war.

It may be an obvious metaphor, but it plays out in very real, very human terms. Underneath the Hollywood gloss — and the really great clothes — we see desperate people, facing uncertain fates in a world that’s been overturned. Their moral choices in the face of brute power range from passive capitulation to shabby compromise to active resistance.

While Casablanca was responding specifically to its own period, it still has something to say today. While it’s a movie of the Second World War, there are different kinds of battles being waged right now.

Casablanca’s ultimate message is about rediscovered decency, about the recommitment to work for a better world, even in the face of weariness and disillusion. Screenwriter Julius Epstein later admitted the script could be corny. “But when corn works,” he added, “There’s nothing better.”

This week, I needed some corn.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca