I recently treated myself to a viewing of one of my all-time favourite films, stone-cold classic Casablanca. A black-and-white movie from 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart as Rick and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa, alongside a brilliant supporting cast. It’s set in the eponymous city in Morocco, although filmed almost entirely at Warner Bros studios in California. Filming on location would have been challenging on account of the real Casablanca was a war zone at the time — of which more in a minute.
I’ve seen this film a bunch of times before, including at the cinema in 2012 for the 70th-anniversary re-release, but this time, as they say, it hit different.
On previous viewings, I’d always been focused on the doomed love story and the glamorous-yet-dangerous setting. Plus Dooley Wilson as pianist and singer Sam, performing the iconic song You Must Remember This. And of course Claude Rains as Louis, the chief of police who steals every scene he’s in as surely as he pockets his winnings from the roulette table (seconds after uttering the line ‘I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find gambling going on in here!’). The whole script is stuffed full of lines that have permeated into our culture so deeply that they get quoted on the regular without context (‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ ‘Round up the usual suspects,’ ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ etc)*. This movie, regularly reckoned one of the greatest ever made, has provided the inspiration for twisty crime drama The Usual Suspects, glam rock banger 2HB by Roxy Music, and even gets referenced in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Guards! Guards
On the latest time of viewing, I enjoyed all that stuff of course, as much as ever, but there were certain things that really leapt out at me this time in a way they hadn’t before. For example, there’s a scene where a group of Nazi soldiers come into Rick’s bar and start singing Die Wacht am Rhein (a German patriotic song that goes down poorly with the bar’s other customers). Whereupon resistance leader Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid) goes up to the band and gets them to play the Marseillaise. The two songs duel for a minute, but then, as nearly all the customers join in with the French anthem, many singing with tears in their eyes, the Germans are first drowned out and then give up. It’s an incredibly powerful scene, and what hit me about it this time round was that this was filmed in 1942.
At the time, metropolitan France was split between an area directly occupied by the Nazis, and the so-called Vichy Republic (a nominally independent rump regime that collaborated with the Nazis, as represented in the film by the corrupt and venal police chief). Casablanca itself, part of French Morocco, was on the front lines of the Allied invasion of North Africa. The US had only recently joined the War. And the film’s storyline about refugees fleeing war-torn Europe wasn’t just a plot device — while the ‘letters of transit’ that provide the MacGuffin are a plot-convenient invention, the background was very real. In fact, a number of actors who appear in the film had themselves fled Europe, including Paul Henreid. At the time of filming, the war was still raging, and, crucially, nobody knew that the Nazis were going to lose. When the actors declared ‘Vive la France!’, they didn’t know there was ever going to be a truly independent France again. Those tears in the eyes were not produced by the special effects department.
Another thing that really hit me this time is the way that Rick’s character arc reflects the real-life politics of the 1930s and 1940s, specifically how the anti-fascist movement went from idealism to despair and finally found hope and fought back. While expat American bar-owner Rick claims neutrality and projects an air of world-weariness, we hear that he ran guns to Ethiopia (to fight against the invasion by fascist Italy) and fought on the Republican (ie, anti-fascist) side in the Spanish Civil War. We also see him rig his own roulette table to ensure that a young Bulgarian refugee couple win enough money to pay for their exit visas. He shrugs off their gratitude, but we can tell that, under the hard shell, he’s a man of principles whose cynicism is the result of bitter disappointments.
Ok, so spoiler alert, because this film might be older than your grandma, but if you’ve never seen it before, you deserve the chance to experience it without knowing how it ends.
Of course, like his country, Rick eventually Does the Right Thing, and sacrifices his chance of personal happiness with his old flame Ilsa in favour of getting her to leave Casablanca with her resistance-leader husband. Louis has his own sudden redemption, allowing the couple to escape, Rick to get away with murder (literally) and chucking a bottle of Vichy water in the bin. Then the two men walk off together, planning to join the Free French in Brazzaville, and Rick utters the film’s final iconic line: ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’
(Another thing I noticed more on this viewing is the latent homoeroticism of this relationship, but that’s another topic altogether).
So, as the various characters head off into the fog and an uncertain future, the film shows us how they have travelled from cynicism, corruption and despair into a rekindling of hope and a determination to fight the forces of fascism however they can.
For some reason, I found this especially resonant this time round
Now, if you wanted to be a detractor, you could point out that this is all very clichéd and hokey and the plot doesn’t really stand up to close scrutiny and that any critique of French colonialism and actual Moroccans are both conspicuous by their absence. To which I say, yeah, sure, whatever, those are all valid points, and it’s hardly surprising if a film that was made over eight decades ago is a bit dated in some ways. But it’s still a cinematic masterpiece, and one that speaks to our present moment. As time goes by, the fundamental things apply. Maybe I’ll go and play it again. Just as soon as I’ve got this bit of dust out of my eye.
*fun fact: the oft-quoted line ‘Play it again, Sam,’ never actually appears in the film. It’s the ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ of classic Hollywood.
