Film review

Michael Curtiz (1942)

Of course I’d seen clips but I don’t remember having watched the whole thing before.  By the end of the widely, dearly beloved Casablanca, it had been a bit like listening to an unfamiliar Shakespeare play, thanks to the famous phrases I didn’t realise the film coined.  I knew ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ started life here and that ‘Play it again, Sam’ misquotes what Ingrid Bergman actually says to Dooley Wilson (‘Play it, Sam.  Play “As Time Goes By”’).  I didn’t know or had forgotten that ‘We’ll always have Paris’, ‘Round up the usual suspects’ and ‘… this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’ all originated in the Casablanca screenplay (all, as it happens, within the film’s last few minutes).

What’s come to be seen as the timeless epitome of Hollywood romantic drama is a film of a very specific date, as the scene-setting words and newsreel narrator tones of the opening voiceover make explicitly clear[1].  Casablanca was shot a few months after the US entered World War II:  the protagonist Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) – owner of ‘Rick’s Café Américain’, where the action mostly takes place – personifies American isolationism yielding eventually to self-sacrificing involvement.  Holed up in his nightclub-cum-gambling-den, Rick drinks alone and professes no interest in politics but it soon emerges that he ran guns to Ethiopia during the recent conflict with Italy, and fought for the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War.  Rick’s jaded cynicism is really the legacy of a love affair – in Paris, not long after the outbreak of war across Europe – with a woman called Ilsa Lund.  She unexpectedly deserted him, just as they were preparing to leave the city.  Ilsa’s astonishing reappearance in Casablanca, at Rick’s club (‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’), instantly stirs up his buried passion.  This isn’t difficult to accept:  Ilsa is played by Ingrid Bergman, who similarly ignites Casablanca from the moment she appears on the screen.

Not that the film has been sluggish up to this point.  The solemn, urgent voiceover at the start compels attention.  From that point on, Michael Curtiz never lets the pace slacken, creating some local colour in the Casablanca souk before moving inside Rick’s club and building momentum there.  The screenplay, by Julius J Epstein, Philip G Epstein and Howard Koch, is adapted from an unproduced stage play, Everyone Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.  (I suppose it’s conceivable they thought up one or more of the immortal lines quoted above.)   The narrative unfolds largely within the club yet the film isn’t remotely static – and not just because there’s plenty of physical action at Rick’s place.  Casablanca stands as a good example of confidence in originally theatrical material to deliver excitement through the essential themes and circumstances that it dramatises, even when that happens on a single set.  The club, with its international personnel and clientele, functions as, among other things, an analogue of the claustrophobic predicament of those anxious to get out of ‘imprisoned Europe … toward the freedom of the Americas’ but who ‘wait and wait … and wait’.

Ilsa turns up at Rick’s with her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Czech Resistance leader and renowned fugitive.  In order to escape to America and continue his work at a safe distance, Laszlo requires ‘letters of transit’, which have accidentally come into Rick’s possession.  It’s as she’s trying to obtain these letters from him that Ilsa explains to Rick that, when they met and fell in love in Paris, she wrongly believed her husband had been killed attempting to escape a concentration camp.  Ilsa also admits she still loves Rick.  He agrees to help her with the letters of transit: who will eventually use these to secure passage to Lisbon and across the Atlantic is a matter of continuing suspense.  First, Rick allows Ilsa to believe they’ll stay together once her husband has left with the letters.  Then Laszlo, realising that his wife and Rick are in love, urges the latter to take Ilsa to America.  At the foggy airport where the film’s final scene takes place, Rick’s climactic act of self-denial for the greater good is to make Ilsa board a Lisbon-bound plane along with her husband.  Rick stays behind and watches them fly off to safety.  (It has to be said the plane looks, to modern eyes, a distinctly unsafe conveyance.)

In the early stages, it’s hard to see Rick free of Humphrey Bogart’s later roles as a world-weary but essentially honourable hero.  As the film goes on, Bogart breaks out of this palimpsest and Rick becomes more strongly individual.  Many people like Bogart, the actor and his persona, for their supposed absence of sentimentality (even though that quality is sometimes romanticised in his films).  I tend to find him too samey for my taste but there’s no denying his lack of conventional glamour and odd gait give Bogart a highly distinctive reality on screen, very much in evidence in Casablanca.  The flashbacks to Rick and Ilsa’s time together in Paris are remarkable for how often Bogart smiles in them.  The smiles are modest but, because they’re a rare commodity in a Bogart performance, powerful.  How did 1940s cameramen light stars’ eyes in black-and-white pictures to shine the way that Bogart’s and, especially, Ingrid Bergman’s shine here?  Although the effect is strongest when Ilsa’s eyes fill up with tears, the cinematographer Arthur Edeson makes them lucent almost throughout. The greater variety of characters Bergman played in the course of her career ensures that she never seems, as Bogart does initially, to be doing her usual thing.  Her ardency and emotional mobility are very appealing.

In the supporting cast, Claude Rains is the standout as the breezily corrupt police chief Renault.  At first, Rains is almost too entertaining (a couple of times, he anticipates a feed line, so keen is he to deliver Renault’s witty rejoinder) but his acting becomes a vital means of deflating the melodramatic twists and turns of the story.  A Bulgarian refugee (Joy Page) and her roulette-playing husband (Helmut Dantine) are enabled to get out of Casablanca.  Renault instructs them to come to his office next morning to finalise arrangements.  Grateful and eager, they assure him they’ll be there at six o’clock.  Renault replies affably, ‘I’ll be there at ten’.  Rains never cutifies Renault’s candid lack of principle but it’s impossible not to enjoy the actor’s aplomb.  In a different way, Paul Henreid’s lack of charisma serves a not dissimilar purpose in making Victor Laszlo more believable.  That, however, may have not have been what Henreid intended.  Although he shares top billing with Bogart and Bergman, he’s outshone not just by them and Rains but also by Conrad Veidt as Strasser, the senior Nazi officer sent to Casablanca to capture Laszlo.

Casablanca reunites Bogart with two of his co-stars from the previous year’s The Maltese Falcon, both playing members of the local underworld.  As Ugarte, whose business is selling the letters of transit that drive the plot, Peter Lorre disappears from the film all too soon.  As Signor Ferrari, a black marketeer who’s also a rival bar owner, Sydney Greenstreet is a very peculiar world citizen – a fez-wearing Italian whose accent is sui generis.  The more broadly-accented actors in smaller roles, notably the mittel-European waiter Carl (S Z Sakall) and the Russian barman Sascha (Leonid Kinskey), are a lot more amusing than might be expected.  Knowing the real-life circumstances of some of the cast gives their presence an edge:  of those mentioned above, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, S Z Sakall and Helmut Dantine had all fled Nazi Germany.

The soundtrack includes, as well as its most famous component, a Max Steiner score and other popular songs performed by Dooley Wilson’s Sam (Rick’s loyal pal as well as house pianist).  When a group of Nazi officers, led by Strasser, break into ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, Laszlo wants the club’s band to play the Marseillaise instead.  Rick gives the go ahead: the enthusiastic community singing of the French anthem drowns out the German one.  ‘As Time Goes By’ features three times.  When Sam first accedes to Ilsa’s famous request, Rick angrily intervenes: ‘Sam, I thought I told you never to play –‘.  (He then catches sight of Ilsa for the first time – since Paris.)  The second time, the song passes off relatively without incident.  The third time, things have got so tense between the principals that the exasperated look on Ingrid Bergman’s face says, ‘Give it a rest, Sam’.

14 February 2020

[1] ‘With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.  Lisbon became the great embarkation point.  But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly.  And so a torturous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up.  Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran.  Then, by train or auto or foot, across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.  Here, the fortunate ones, through money or influence or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon.  And from Lisbon to the New World.  But the others wait in Casablanca.  And wait and wait…and wait.’