If anybody is in the mood for some extra credit, here you go. Read the following Casablanca analyses and comment freely below. Be specific (with regards to the film and the reviews) in your comments. You'll get credit for quality and quantity.
March 19, 2012
EVERYBODY COMES TO RICK’S: “CASABLANCA” ON
THE BIG SCREEN
The New Yorker
Sometime in the sixties, a mythic event occurred in
Harvard Square. At the Brattle Theatre, during a showing of “Casablanca,” the
sound failed in the last scene, and the assembled worshipers, speaking as one,
intoned the famous final line: “Louis, this could be the beginning of a
beautiful friendship.” It’s just possible that the story is true. In the entire
history of American cinema only a few other movies—“Gone With the Wind,” “The
Wizard of Oz,” “The Godfather”—have been loved as much and as well as “Casablanca.”
After seeing it on television for years, or suffering through a chewed-up print
in a broken-seat revival house, moviegoers will have a chance to witness a
freshly struck print this Wednesday, March 21st, on large screens. “Casablanca” is
seventy years old. For one day, it will be playing all over the country. It’s
worth going: the most familiar movie in the world is still fresh; it has so
many little busy corners to nestle in.
The universal adoration has been produced by an
unrepeatable combination of impudent wit and doomed romanticism, all of it held
together by voluptuously emotional anti-fascist sentiment. Politically,
“Casablanca” is a very knowing film. Several people in the movie refer to the
not-so-hidden earlier activities of Humphrey Bogart’s saloon keeper Rick
Blaine—running guns to Ethiopia and fighting in Spain on the Loyalist side
(“and well-paid for it each time,” as he acidly notes). The vast American
theatre audience of the forties (eighty to ninety million people a week) was
expected to know what all that referred to, and why it was the right (that is,
left) and smart thing to do in the thirties. Rick helped Haile Selassie take on
the Italian fascists, and helped the Spanish Socialists fight Franco. Among
other things, the movie is a desperate appeal to the honor of the French, who
had gone down meekly before the Nazis, and a poke in the ribs to sleeping
Americans: Get into this war and win it. “Casablanca” was completed in 1942,
but it’s set in December, 1941, the time of Pearl Harbor.
As for myself, everything I know about history is derived
from the prologue. A slowly spinning globe sits in a fleecy tuft of clouds, and
a dour March of Time voice outlines the refugee situation during the war. We
see documentary footage (the trudging homeless) and an animated map—an inky
line movies from Paris to Marseilles, from there to Oran, and finally to
Casablanca, where the lucky ones escape via Lisbon and the rest “wait…and
wait…and wait.” Stranded (“I will die in Casablanca”), they
congregate at Rick’s American Café, a vast white stucco cavern, with arches,
interior rooms, potted palms, a bar, a bandstand, an upstairs office. It is the
Big White Nightclub of so many Hollywood movies in the thirties and forties
movies, made exotic by men in fezzes. A more astonishing collection of
scoundrels, innocents, and cynics has never been brought together in one place.
There are refugees and black marketers, defrocked bankers and resistance
fighters, gamblers, floozies, French colonial policemen, American and Spanish
entertainers, and, eventually, Nazi officers (who in reality never set foot in
Casablanca). It is all of Europe, monitored by a cynical American and his black
sidekick at the piano (the very talented actor Dooley Wilson, who was taught to
sing for this movie, with memorable results). Except for an earnest young wife
who is willing to sell her virtue to get herself and her husband out of
Casablanca, there isn’t a dull one among them. “Casablanca” is the most
sociable, the most companionable film ever made. Life as an endless party.
The opening scenes are a series of preposterously barbed
encounters. All these people are stranded in unoccupied France—colonial
Morocco—with its unfathomable protocols of safety and risk. Fascists and
anti-fascists insult one another and get away with it. It’s almost a sport: who
can make the most insinuating remarks? Rick’s old girlfriend Ilse Lund (Ingrid
Bergman) shows up with her noble resistance-fighter husband, Victor Laszlo
(Paul Henreid), and they, too, immediately go to the café and trade insults.
All of this is nonsense, of course—no underground leader would show up in a
tropical white suit in a night club with his gorgeous wife on his arm—but the
movie takes place in a magic space, the blissful imagining of big-studio
Hollywood, a playground for the knowing, the sexual, the witty, the
risk-takers.
Conrad Veidt’s Major Strasser, an elegant Nazi with
precise diction, keeps hissing threats at Laszlo, but Strasser’s power is
limited. Casablanca is actually run by two men of the world, the corrupt
prefect Louis Reynaud (Claude Rains) and Rick, the American freebooter; and
it’s swayed by a minor deity, Senor Ferrari (Sidney Greenstreet, who wears a
fez and speaks in a British accent). Ferrari proudly refers to his elevated
status as “the head of all illegal activities in Casablanca.” Clearly a man of
substance, it’s his party, too. Everything is negotiable in Casablanca, where
the sternest idealism and the most obvious larceny are in constant touch. We
want the world to be like this—fast, allusive, morally compromised, and noble
at the same time. Every night, Rick the alcoholic saloon keeper puts on a white
dinner jacket and presides over his tumultuous playpen.
“Casablanca” was based on “the world’s worst play”
(according to James Agee)—an unproduced work, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” by
Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. An anonymous Warner Bros. story analyst in New
York, reading it in manuscript, nevertheless reported the alluring presence of
“sophisticated hokum.” The most important producer at Warner, Hal B. Wallis,
who had just signed a deal giving him unlimited control over the pictures he
worked on, began assembling a script. The usual accounting of this tortuous
process goes like this: Screenwriter Casey Robinson fleshed out the romantic
entanglement of Rick and Ilse; the twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein
worked on the structure; and Howard Koch handled the politics and toned
everything up. The men gathered at Wallis’s farm, in the San Fernando Valley,
and blended the different parts together. (Koch remained with the production
and re-wrote parts of it as it was shot.) Wallis dismissed the studio’s
gruesome initial choice of actors (Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan), got turned
down by George Raft (who was offered the part of Rick), and then traded, for
one picture, Warners’ star Olivia de Haviland to David O. Selznick for the
young womanly Swedish beauty Ingrid Bergman. Finally, with Bergman and Bogart,
who was grumpy and dissatisfied, in tow, he began production in Burbank, in
April, 1942. The Warners staff director, Michael Curtiz, an exiled Hungarian
Jew, was in charge.
That mélange of screenwriters produced some adorably
terrible lines, including the much appreciated “Victor, please don’t go to the
underground meeting tonight.” But it also produced such famous bits of
insolence, as the exchange between Rick and Louis (“I came to Casablanca for
the waters.” “Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.” “I was misinformed.”),
and, of course, the single best use of the passive voice in movie history: Rick
plugs Strasser, and Renault says to his men, “Major Strasser has been shot.
Round up the usual suspects.” As the production moved along, no one knew how
the story would end—an uncertainty which, it is commonly believed, enhanced
Ingrid Bergman’s anxiety, playing into her extraordinarily touching
performance. Wallis and Curtiz eventually agreed to shoot Howard Koch’s
preferred ending, with distraught Ilse, still in love with Rick, going off with
Laszlo to America, and Rick and Louis going off together into the fog. (In
Morocco? Fog? Never mind.) Wallis himself apparently wrote the
closing line. In the end, the American cynic, the selfish bastard who “sticks
his neck out for nobody” but gets things done, agrees to fight the Nazis. The
Axis powers are doomed.
In real life, the place that everybody came to was
Hollywood in the thirties and forties. In the fascist period, Los Angeles was
the arts capital of the Western world. Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Otto
Klemperer were there, as well as Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht, Lion
Feuchtwanger, Hanns Eisler, and many, many others. The studios were crawling
with European musicians, actors, and directors. Wallis put together the
staggering cast, which included Peter Lorre, Greenstreet, Veidt (who had been a
major star in Germany), Marcel Dalio (the star, a few years earlier, of
Renoir’s “Rules of the Game”), Leonid Kinsky (the lecherous bartender), and S.
Z. Sakall (the chubby waiter Karl), mainly out of Warners’ pool of contract
players. The commissary at lunch, with its mix of nationalities and accents,
may not have been all that different from Rick’s Café. The people there are all
desperate for work, desperate to find a home, yet happy to be alive and stuck
in an absurdly sunshiny place in a naïvely optimistic country. The combination
of European bitterness and American joy made “Casablanca” possible. America
will save Europe. American movies will save Europe. When
Victor Laszlo leads the demoralized French in the “Marseilles,” and even
Yvonne, the chippy who is sleeping with a Nazi officer, joins in, the stoniest
intellectual collapses in tears. It never fails, no matter how many times
you’ve seen it. Kitsch has never been so powerful.
Kenneth Tynan called the movie “a masterpiece of light
entertainment,” which, I think, strikes exactly the right note. You can’t take
any of “Casablanca” seriously—but then, you are not meant to. The breathless
excitement of the last third, with its reversals at gunpoint, is laughably
melodramatic, and you laugh at yourself for being so caught up in it. Michael
Curtiz, a very skilled director, keeps the camera moving through the café,
rushing from table to table like an eager waiter. In the Paris flashbacks, he
sustains the high-romantic tone of ardor and rain-soaked disillusion. He’s good
at all the small atmospheric things going on in corners—the people selling each
other something or desperately drinking or gambling. The closeups of Bergman,
lit by cameraman Arthur Edeson (who also shot “The Maltese Falcon”), are
uniformly ravishing. The general level of craftsmanship and Burbank Orientalism
is superb. It would be hard, however, to see much of Curtiz’s point of view in
the material. The auteurs of “Casablanca” are Hal Wallis and the long-ago big
studios themselves—their atmosphere and talents, with corruptions and
generosities all mixed together—what André Bazin called “the genius of the
system.”
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September
15, 1996
CASABLANCA
Roger
Ebert
Chicago Sun Times
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.
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