Summary:
Against the backdrop of refugees fleeing the German advance in Europe during the early years of the Second World War we follow three characters involved in a love triangle. Victor Laszlo (Henreid) is a Resistance leader who has escaped from a German concentration camp. Accompanied by his wife, Ilsa (Bergman), he has reached Casablanca, administered by the authorities of Vichy France. He now needs to get out of there before he is recaptured by the Germans. The only person who can help him is Rick Blaine (Bogart), who has earlier fallen in love with Ilsa in Paris at a time when she believed her husband to be dead. Rick has to choose between his love for a woman and the larger demands imposed on individuals by the war.
Analysis:
Casablanca is seen as a Hollywood ‘classic’ but how has it attained this status? Does it arise from the combination of a melodramatic love story set within a threatening world, a strong star presence enhanced by seductive cinematography, a satisfying cause-and-effect narrative that moves to an intense moment of resolution, a rhapsodic use of music reinforcing the melodrama, an ironic script that counterpoints the melodrama, an exotic location enabling an escape from the everyday world, and noir lighting that reminds the spectator of the darker aspects of life that continue to exist around the fringes of this imagined space of gratification? Or is it a ‘classic’ created as much by marketing as through thematic content and film style? Casablanca was rushed through production by Warner Brothers so its release would coincide with a major Allied conference in Morocco; it was further publicised by receiving eight Oscar nominations and winning three; it became a cult film in the 1960s; and, with the advent of video and DVD, assorted anniversary box sets maintained its profile.
As a product of the Hollywood studio system, Casablanca could be explored as an example of the way in which inputs of studio, cast and crew come together during this period in a collaborative production process. There is a distinctive industrial-creative process at work. Ultimate corporate control is exerted by the studio, Warner Brothers, but there are also creative inputs from producer, director, stars, and other members of the cast and crew. The screenplay alone involves several contributors: Howard Koch, Julius and Philip Epstein and Casey Robinson. The music includes recurring melodies by Steiner but also the distinctive delivery of songs (‘As Time Goes By’ in particular) by Wilson. In performance terms, there is the star presence of Bogart and Bergman but also the character acting of Rains, Greenstreet and Lorre. Curtiz was an experienced operator having directed over 100 films (and this was Bogart’s forty-fifth Hollywood movie). Overarching the whole process there is the presence of the studio dictating not only the overall ‘look’ of the product but also the political outlook.
The narrative shows how in wartime films Hollywood’s dominant ideological concerns are altered to bring them into line with the demands of a war situation. ‘Getting the girl’ is not what matters in the end (such considerations are put off ‘for the duration’). In the light of issues felt to be of such magnitude that they dwarfed personal relationships Hollywood emphasises self-sacrifice and duty. The final shot is of male bonding between Rick and Renault (America and Free France).
Our engagement with the melodrama can obscure the centrality of ideology to this film. Those involved were driven by a desire to address the political and (at the time) pressingly contemporary issue of German fascism. This was a fundamental concern for Warner Brothers’ executives but also for liberals like Bogart, cast members like Veidt and Lorre, who had fled Nazi Germany, and Curtiz, who had earlier come to Hollywood from Europe. This was a ‘wake-up call’ for America; as Rick Blaine (Bogart) says, ‘I bet they’re asleep in New York. I bet they’re asleep all over America.’ Blaine has confronted the Italians by supplying guns to Ethiopia in 1935 and fought in Spain against the fascists in 1936; and contemporary hardships of refugees in Europe are presented in a documentary style that conflates this fictional narrative with newsreels of the period. Significantly, the film is set in December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. The script deals with the brutality not only of Germany but also of Marshal Petain’s Vichy France administration in collaborating with the Germans against the Free French resistance. The dark presence of concentration camps in occupied Europe is behind everything we see. Often, even Rick’s one-line asides carry serious bite (‘What do you want for Sam?’ produces ‘I don’t buy or sell human beings’). At the same time, despite (or because of) these intense underpinning issues, the Germans and Italians are also often presented in stereotypical comic-book fashion, and there are comic interludes as with the pickpocket and the bumbling stereotypical English couple.
The ‘What do you want for Sam?’ line from Greenstreet’s Ferrari carries weight, beyond what Warners is likely to have intended, since Sam is African American. There are stories of audiences in all-black cinemas in America demanding the projectionist rewind Sam’s parts and replay them as it was so unusual to see a black actor with anything approaching a substantial role in a Hollywood movie. And yet, how we should read the presence (or present absence) of Sam within the film is a contentious issue. In theory, as Rick says, he is within the narrative free to make his own decisions but in reality Sam maintains the dutiful sense of subordinate loyalty expected in a master–servant relationship. The very notion of including a designated ‘free’ black man in the film within the context of an American society (and Hollywood films) founded upon segregation should not be underestimated. But, do we in fact have conservative racial politics within a film that purports to expound liberal views? At the very least it would seem a major suppression within the text to have America exalted as the bastion of democratic freedoms and cosmopolitanism (see the nationalities represented within Rick’s Café Americana) while Sam is forced to passively represent millions socially and economically designated as second-class citizens in that country. Just as tellingly, Moroccans are almost totally absent from the film. There is one named supposed ‘Moroccan’, Abdul, the doorman (Dan Seymour), and Casablanca itself as presented bears no relation to the actual place.
If we are to place the film within the context the script demands we need to know about the Italian colonial enterprise in Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, the American debate over whether or not to become involved in the Second World War, the Vichy administration of France, the social and economic realities of racial segregation in America and the nature of the way in which North African countries and peoples were looked upon by America and other European powers. We need to be aware of the seriousness of life and death in Occupied Europe as well as some light-hearted clichéd cultural perspectives held in 1940s America.
Above all we should note how America is represented as the Promised Land for refugees, a place of safety and a guardian of freedom and democracy. This is from one perspective a factual truth of American history. Religious and political refugees (as well as economic refugees) had been amongst those crossing the Atlantic from Europe. In the 80 years or so before the Second World War, Europeans flooded in beneath the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. They formed a large percentage of both the national population and the Hollywood filmmaking population; as a result, there was always likely to be support for the dispossessed and oppressed of Europe. However, at the same time the United States had during the interwar years followed a strongly isolationist foreign policy, determinedly keeping out of overseas conflicts. There was, therefore, a heated debate during the late 1930s and early 1940s about whether to enter the war or not. Warner Brothers was in favour of America joining the war and Casablanca was part of its ongoing film-based contribution to the debate, or, if you like, propaganda for its point of view. Franklin Roosevelt had moved the country steadily nearer to war, repealing the Neutrality Act, for instance, in order to supply Britain and pushing through an act to lend or lease supplies when Britain could no longer afford to pay. But, it was not until after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 that the debate was finally clinched in favour of intervention.
If Casablanca is to be understood as more than a romantic wartime drama it has to be seen within a historical and political context. There is pleasure to be gained from the romance, and the suspense (as the film also operates as a thriller), but there is an additional depth of understanding that goes with grasping the contexts within which the film was made and originally shown. Imagining this being shown in the United States or Britain as the war was going on (the turning globe and narrator’s voiceover at the beginning clearly suggesting this war is inescapably affecting the whole world) enables us to understand the film in a fuller, more complete way. It may also alert us to ways in which this film could be read in relation to the post-war emergence of the United States as a global imperial power.
Finally, returning to the ideological complexities of the film, if we were to consider the lead female role we might be struck by the passivity of Ilsa. She is the dutiful wife and the woman who asks her man to think for her. The film may advocate liberal values in the face of fascism but it also suppresses important issues with regard to both race and gender.
John White
Cast and Crew:
[Country: USA. Production Company: Warner Brothers. Director: Michael Curtiz. Producer: Hal Wallis. Screenwriters: Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. Cinematographer: Arthur Edeson. Music: Max Steiner. Editor: Owen Marks. Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Rick Blaine), Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Laszlo), Paul Henreid (Victor Laszlo), Claude Rains (Louis Renault), Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser), Sydney Greenstreet (Senor Ferrari), Dooley Wilson (Sam), Peter Lorre (Ugarte).]
Further Reading:
Aljean Harmetz, Round up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca – Bogart, Bergman and World War II, New York, Hyperion, 1992.
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: Patriotism, Movies and the Second World War from ‘Ninotchka’ to ‘Mrs Miniver’, London, I.B. Tauris, 2000.
Harlan Lebo, Casablanca: Behind the Scenes, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Richard Maltby, Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus, Metuchen, NJ, Scarecrow Press, 1993.
James C. Robertson, Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz, London, Routledge, 1993.
Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.