Oscars Retrospective: Casablanca (16th Academy Awards Review)
As Time Goes By~Dooley Wilson
Casablanca is one of the greatest and most beloved movies of all time, often considered the best film to come out of Hollywood during the war years, one of the best films of the Golden Age of Hollywood and is still a great watch even over 75 years after the war has ended. In a time when Hollywood was churning out war pictures non-stop, Casablanca in particular seems to stick out as an especially treasured film. In the words of famed film critic, Roger Ebert, while Citizen Kane (1941) might be the greatest movie of all time, Casablanca is arguably the most loved. So let’s analyze why, shall we?
Casablanca is set in Casablanca, Morocco, revolving around the numerous expats and refugees who make their homes in the city. In particular, it centers on the owner of a nightclub/gambling den named Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), a cynical and depressed stick-in-the-mud who has no qualms about patronizing the local Nazis, represented in the film by Major Heinrich Strasser (Conrad Veidt) and Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains). Rick’s life is upended, however, when he meets his old flame, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), who is on the run from the Nazis with her husband, a resistance leader named Victor Laszlo (Paul Henried). The film then focuses on the unraveling of Rick’s mysterious past with Ilsa and his struggle with whether to turn Ilsa and Victor in to the Nazis or to help them escape Casablanca.
The look of the film is one of the quintessential elements to its success. I’ve heard differing debates on whether or not Casablanca is technically considered a film noir, especially since it is a lot more inspiring and hopeful than your average film noir, but at the very least it looks like a noir. The heavy shadows and stylized camera angles was something that was catching on more and more in a post-Citizen Kane world and Casablanca made some of the best usage of it yet. Whether it’s the dark shadows that encapsulates Rick’s world-weary face as he drinks his problems away or the picturesque fog during the finale, the cinematography and lighting makes you feel right at home in the murky underworld that our characters inhabit.
Silver nitrate, even though it was a horrific compound that caused more fatal fires than should have been allowed, really gives the film an almost glistening quality. The black-and-white cinematography is so essential to Casablanca that they actually once tried to colorize the movie and, wouldn’t you know it, the film came out the worst for it. It’s really amazing how the style of the noir was so intrinsic to being in black-and-white that it could not survive for long in the color era.
Some movies were made to be black-and-white.
I’m also pretty sure that this is the movie that pioneered the Gaussian Girl style of shooting. This refers to a film technique where when the film shoots its subject (usually a woman), the focus will be softened to give the character an almost otherworldly beauty. This has mostly fallen out of vogue but was a dime a dozen during the Golden Age of Hollywood. While this has been experimented with in earlier films, you really notice it here. Almost every scene with Ingrid Bergman’s character is shot in this soft focus, giving the character a dreamy, almost otherworldly quality. It makes her easier to love and sympathize with and emphasizes the tender sadness of the character.
The story is also excellent. On the off chance you’re one of the few people who hasn’t seen this movie and doesn’t know how it ends, Casablanca is very much the fairy tale that Hollywood loves to espouse. But now instead of being presented to a Great Depression-era crowd, it’s presented to a World War II-era crowd. Humphrey Bogart’s career was defined by these film noir anti-heroes and Rick Blaine stands out as his most complex character. This is a man who has been thoroughly mistreated by life again and again, constantly dreaming of a life that he wished he had but has been denied from him. Thus, he must find it in himself to believe in something greater than him to do the right thing.
While it’s not really clear if this was deliberately meant as an allegory, it can certainly be identified as one. If Rhett Butler from Gone With the Wind (1939) was representative of the archetypical American male during the Great Depression, Rick Blaine takes up that role for the American of World War II. If you were over a certain age when this movie came out, you had to trudge through a decade of hardship of being denied the American Dream, only to be drafted into a war that is being fought over a bunch of countries a world away. But it’s still the right thing to do and demands sacrifice, just like Rick finds out over the course of the movie.
I also give the movie credit in that Rick is such a well-written character that you do sometimes wonder whether or not he will ultimately do the right thing in the end. Granted, it’s still Hollywood, I’m sure you know it’s a happy ending, but they spend so much time showing just how badly he wants to be with Ilsa, that it’s very conceivable that he could screw over Victor if he so chooses. When it comes time for the famous finale where they’re racing for the airplane that will take everyone to safety, you’re not entirely sure what’s going to happen. Will Victor get away with Ilsa and Rick? Will Victor go alone and Ilsa choose Rick over him? Will no one make it? (There’s an old rumor that the script was still being written as the film was being shot so no one in the cast was entirely sure how it was actually going to end and it came out during their performance. As far as I’m aware, however, this has been mostly debunked; the script was still being written but the actors knew what the major dramatic beats would be.)
Ilsa Lund is Ingrid Bergman’s most iconic role and she is also very excellent in this movie. In the hands of any other actress, Ilsa could very easily have become just a generic love interest that you see a dime a dozen in these movies. Instead, combined with the aforementioned Gaussian Girl effect, Bergman brings across this real sadness and passion to this character. You really get a sense that she’s genuinely afraid for her husband, herself, Rick and her entire country. But she’s not too much of a damsel-in-distress either. Bergman still gets across this sense of iron will to this character who will never give up trying to save France.
The villains are also interesting and show the two sides of the Vichy France regime. Major Strasser is a proper Nazi from Germany with this steely menace who’s on the hunt for the Resistance spies. Conrad Veidt was actually a refugee from Nazi Germany and, once armed with this knowledge, you can tell he enjoys making the Nazi as unlikable as possible. While he is enjoyably evil, the show is stolen by Claude Rains’ delightful performance as Captain Louis Renault. Instead of being representative of Nazi Germany, Louis represents the more casual evil of Vichy France. A man who just enjoys his little slice of power as the police captain in Casablanca and has to deal with the Nazi stick-in-the-mud looking for his spies. Rains brings the same level of scenery-chewing that he brought to all of his other villainous roles and he has so much fun being so unapologetically corrupt, you’re going to have fun with him.
This dynamic of the two bad guys doesn’t just make for good commentary of the alternative evils of Vichy France (the actual evil of the Nazis versus the redeemable evil of the everyday Frenchman who’s just looking out for himself) but also adds a nice twist of suspense to the film. The good guys don’t only have to outfox the evil villain with infinite resources; they also have to defeat the shrewder villain who actually knows our hero and will be suspicious if he sees anything wrong. Plus, the character is also hilarious without sucking out any menace.
The rest of the cast is also excellent with a very memorable gallery of side-characters. There’s Signor Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a member of the French Resistance who seems constantly terrified of being discovered; Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) who, like Rick, just wants to make a living in the local underworld but finds that the Nazis are putting a stop to that; and Sam (Dooley Wilson), Rick’s lounge singer and closest thing he has to a friend who thankfully doesn’t incorporate any offensive stereotypes of African-Americans that was so present in Hollywood at the time. Weirdly enough, probably the most forgettable character is Ilsa’s husband, Victor Laszlo. The actor plays him fine but the interest of him seems to be in how he impacts Rick and Ilsa’s relationship. I also never quite fully understood why Strasser and Louis don’t just immediately arrest him the moment they see him. They do mention something about wanting him to commit a crime so they can grab him but let’s be honest here; in real-life Vichy France, the guy would be arrested and tortured before the day was out.
That aside, just about everything else in this movie comes close to perfect and it has aged tremendously well. The script is extremely well-paced, not feeling at all close to its hour and 40 minutes. The dialogue has some of the most iconic lines in cinematic history. (i.e. “Here’s looking at you, kid!” “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” “I have a feeling that this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”) The love scenes are tender and honestly get better the older and older you get after you’ve experienced this type of heartbreak and can understand where Rick is coming from.
All of this would be more than enough to cement Casablanca as a great movie but the question then comes as to what makes it so highly-regarded? It didn’t totally break ground the way that Snow White (1937) or Citizen Kane did. It does have a couple plot holes as mentioned above. While the dialogue is snappy, it’s not as witty or smart as movies made by, say, Ernst Lubitsch. What was it that made audiences fall in love with it so hard and gives it the staying power it still has today?
The obvious answer is World War II but I think it’s also the fact that, unlike many other war movies of the same era, Casablanca is still a good movie first and foremost. The film came out in January of 1943, when the war was still at its nadir. The victory against fascism was by no means assured and the world was becoming a very scary place. Many of the actors and extras were, in fact, refugees from France and that real fear that made them leave their home comes across in their performances. One of the best scenes in the movie is the “Dueling Anthems” sequence where the Nazis start singing the German national anthem and are then drowned out when the entire nightclub sings La Marseilleise, the anthem of France.
If this scene was made in a WWII period piece today, it’d come off as incredibly cheesy. But because the war was still ongoing at the time, it comes off as incredibly powerful. You can see the joy and patriotism in all the extras’ faces, as some of them are actually shedding tears at their lost home. While Mrs. Miniver (1942), made American audiences fall in love with the everyday people who do their part in the war, Casablanca brought it even further home on an emotional level. These are all characters we care about and by making it take place during current events, we care even more. It would’ve been extraordinarily difficult to have watched the end of this movie back in the day and not feel inspired to help out in any way you can in the war effort (like buying the war bonds that were conveniently located in the theater lobby as the end credits of this film still advertise to this day).
Even ignoring the war, Casablanca is still just a great movie. In a time where war movies were preaching and treating the audience like idiots, Casablanca is a film that’s mature enough to show, not tell. It also shows the characters making real, honest-to-God sacrifices which allows the story to hit closer to home rather than just acting like believing in democracy will let everyone live happily ever after. It’s the perfect blend of the scariness of contemporary events combined with a perfect Hollywood fairy tale. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest movies of all time.
But was it movie of the year though?
In case you missed it:
1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2
2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2
3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2
4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2
5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2
6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2
7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2
8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2
9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2
10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2
11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2
12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2
13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2
14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2
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