Casablanca

Casablanca is a film that has steadily grown in stature during my entire lifetime. I came to the study of cinema when the picture was accounted a "guilty pleasure", consistently under-rated, and damned by faint praise.  In the era of the auteur, Michael Curtiz, the picture's director, was deemed a hack -- he was simply too adroit in too many genres to be taken seriously.  In architecture as in the arts, the curse of Oedipus prevails -- sons must dislike the art objects that their fathers made or acclaimed.  Turner Classic Movies could not have existed in the sixties or seventies -- the films that it shows were available, albeit cut to ribbons and intercalcated with commercials in dim, scratchy TV versions.  By and large, people of my generation disliked those movies as verbose, platitudinous, and evasive with respect to violence  and sex -- Casablanca uses concentration camps in support of a romance plot and contains vast amounts of ultra-stylized chatter.  It's also full of aphorisms and patriotic sentiment.  Accordingly, the picture's merits were invisible to my generation.  It's now clear that Casablanca is a film noir -- and, certainly, one of the most accomplished and brilliantly cast.  Viewed as a film noir, the picture takes on additional resonance and, of course, I've reached an age where some of the prejudices of my youth can be cast aside.

The narrative arc in Casablanca is clear:  an embittered American expatriate Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) is hunkered down in Casablanca, a place nominally under the control of the Free French.  He runs a saloon called the Cafe Americaine.  Rick's primary enterprise seems to be the operation of a casino though this kind of gambling is illegal in Morocco -- the casino is tolerated by the worldly, cheerfully corrupt territorial governor, Renault (Paul Henreid). The set up is classical:  the characters are in a kind of decadent limbo, ghosts of their better selves, until something happens to awaken them to their patriotic duties.  The event that triggers the film's plot is the arrival in Casablanca of the heroic freedom-fighter and resistance leader Victor Laszlo and his wife, Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman in one of her most iconic roles.

The plot seems to divide into five acts.  In the first act, the milieu is established, partly in a bravura sequence that cuts between tables in the saloon at which we hear snippets of dialogue defining the situation.  The bar is full of desperate, well-heeled refugees who are trying to escape the Nazi menace on the continent -- the escape route, we learn, runs through neutral Portugal by way of "the plane to Lisbon" that everyone wants to board.  A small-time criminal played by Peter Lorre has killed a couple of Germans and taken from them "Letters of Transit".  In the film, these "Letters of Transit" which have magical powers -- you can cross any border without question if you are bearing one of these -- is the so-called MacGuffin, the object that everyone is pursuing.  At the end of Act One, Ilsa and Laszlo appear and Rick is knocked into a bitter funk.

Act Two is an extended flashback to Paris, rather flimsily shot with unconvincing rear projection -- the rear projection, as is typically the case, imparts a dream-like aspect to the scenes in which it is used.  It's before the Nazi conquest of France.  Rick falls in love with a beautiful, mysterious woman, Ilsa.  They plan to depart Paris, just ahead of the German advance, but when Rick goes to the station for the train to Marseilles, Ilse doesn't meet him -- he's left standing in the rain.

In Act Three, Laszlo and Ilsa are summoned to Police Prefecture where they are threatened by the German general who is also frequenting Rick's Cafe.  Captain Renault remains studiously neutral -- the issue is in doubt in Europe and he wants to be on the winning side.  Rick broods about Ilsa's betrayal.  She comes to see him and he responds to her with disgust.

Act Four is complex with a swiftly arising and swiftly resolved subplot.  It turns out that Renault is exchanging visas for sex and he has his sights set on a beautiful young Bulgarian girl, newly married and only 17 years old.  Rick arranges for the girl's husband to win at roulette so that she can avoid her tryst with Renault and buy a visa or passport from the enormous and corrupt  Sydney Greenstreet, the owner wearing a sinister-looking fez and the owner of a rival tavern, the Blue Parrot.  While Laszlo attends a resistance meeting, Rick entertains Ilsa and she tells him  that she didn't meet him at the train station in Paris because she had just learned that her husband (whom she presumed dead) had escaped from the Concentration Camp and was continuing the Resistance movement.  Rick forgives her.  But, by this time, Ilsa is in love with him again and announces her passion, saying that she will leave Laszlo for him.

Act Five is the denouement and involves Rick surrendering the magical Letters of Transit, which he has been hiding, to Laszlo so that he and Ilsa can escape to continue the fight against the Germans.,  Rick insists that Ilsa go with Laszlo.  The German general,  informed by Renault of the plot, gets to the airport too late and is shot to death by Rick.  Rick and Renault wander off into the fog, celebrating the "start of a beautiful friendship".  The story's themes are clear:  the world war leaves no one on the sidelines -- either you're against the Nazis or with them; love and romance must be sacrificed to the war effort; America (embodied by Rick) is justified in joining the fray.  All of this is presented in the blithe, weightless manner of forties' crime films -- there are some famous songs including Sam (Dewey Wilson) performing "As Time Goes By".  The minor roles are all impeccably performed and the photography is excellent -- the Cafe is a glittering ballroom when it is alive with people and a dark cavern full of remote, enigmatic highlights when the place is closed.  Moorish filigree casts intricate shadows on the action.  A rotating beacon shoots a beam of brilliant light through Rick's darkened cafe about every forty seconds -- why exactly the beacon is aimed toward the ground isn't clear to me.  When Sydney Greenstreet tells Rick he's being "shadowed", the sinister shadow of a parrot darkens an adjacent wall.  Ingrid Bergman is shot with tiny scintillating rays of light in her eyes (which are often luminous with scarcely withheld tears.)  There are famous set-pieces, most remarkably the sequence in which the decadent and panicked patrons at Rick's sing the Marseillaise to the discomfiture of the pompous German brass.  Everything seems to cohere in the best film noir style and the dialogue is a treasure-house of aphorisms and snappy dialogue, much of it justifiably famous.  However, viewed in the clear light of day, away from the romantic moonbeams and perfumed shadows, a lot of the film is rather sloppily contrived.  For instance, the ending in which Renault calls the Germans to create "ticking clock" suspense -- will Laszlo get away or will the Germans intercept him? -- makes no sense.  Laszlo has the "letters of transit" which conquer all and so the Germans couldn't stop him if they wanted.  Similarly, Renault, who will shortly switch sides to become an anti-Nazi, has no motivation to call the German general who arrives, conveniently, without any of his armed staff.  The film shows a great deal of anxiety (due to censorship issues) about the role of Ilsa and her relationship to Laszlo.  Ilsa is excused her dalliance with Rick in Paris because she thought that her Resistance fighter husband had died in the concentration camp.  But she really doesn't act much like a grieving widow when she's with Rick and, in fact, tells him that she is willing to leave Laszlo for the American.  It would have been better just to show her as a woman torn between her love for the picaresque Rick and the upstanding, righteous, courageous (and dull) Laszlo.  But the film wants to insist upon her marital virtue and, so, simply highlights the whole problem which is really central to the film.  In pictorial terms, the movie addresses this issue effectively -- when Ilsa sees Laszlo leading the patriotic song in the bar, she flashes him a look of unconditional adoration (although, perhaps, not love) and, thus, seems to be moved to continue the struggle with him.  But the film is incoherent on this subject because shortly after this scene, Ilsa comes to Rick and declares her love for him and her willingness to leave Laszlo for him (a proposal that Rick, who has become engaged in the struggle will, with great reluctance, reject.)  At one point, someone says:  "Since no one is to blame, I'll ask no questions", a nonsensical if picturesque remark that seems to govern the script.  In a famous scene, Rick says that "at this hour, America is asleep", a reflection on the idle dream that America could stay neutral in the world war and avoid the conflict.  But Casablanca is four hours ahead of New York City.  If it's 10:30 in Casablanca, it's 6:30 in New York City.  The speech doesn't work if Rick says"  "Right now, in America, they're sitting down to eat supper" which would actually be the case.  Notwithstanding these reservations, the film is almost as good as its current reputation and this is saying a lot.