Casablanca (1942)

USA, 102 minutes
Director: Michael Curtiz
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Murray Burnett, Joan Alison, Casey Robinson
Photography: Arthur Edeson
Music: Max Steiner ("As Time Goes By": Herman Hupfeld)
Editor: Owen Marks
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Dooley Wilson, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall, Madeleine Lebeau

In one way or another Casablanca has been with me all my adult life, earning something of the status of a favorite uncle—with its kindliness and predictable pleasures, and not a few flaws (though my perception and indeed judgment of them seem to change all the time), and most of all a soothing familiarity, it's a known quantity that weathers many storms of cinema fashion and just goes on enduring. Something I have been able to return to again and again.

When people talk about glories of Hollywood, this is not necessarily the very first place I go, but it's always among them. It's so big and ripe and luscious, such a piece of work to fall in with, so sweeping and engaging, from its very first shot, a slow zoom on a revolving globe and the map animation that follows as a voiceover spells out the context, all the way through to its fogbound ending.


It started for me when a movie-buff friend pointed me to a late-night broadcast of it on TV the fall after I graduated high school. Not once did the creaking old style of it (an aspect in my view then of many a plodding '30s or '40s production that often did me in, particularly when it was after my bedtime), nor even the all too numerous commercial breaks, put me off my fascination with where things were headed, and how they could resolve, between Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman) and that great man, Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid).

On subsequent viewings, of course, I have come to appreciate the vigorous power of the screenplay that moves all the pawns about the board with such compressed efficiency, the seamless visual economies—there's nothing creaking about it at all—and the way it dares to do so much, mixing up a wartime political thriller with mysterious foreign intrigue with a shameless and beautiful heartstrings romance, and throwing in a few happy-feet numbers as well to spice it up.

I know the fascinating and legendary stories of the production better now, with many of its screenplay pages finalized just days before they were shot. No one involved, not even the writers, are reputed to have known exactly how the picture was going to conclude—one of the points of genius about the story's conception itself is how fruitfully it can accommodate so many plausible directions. Occasionally, notably in the final sequence, that confusion can become almost palpable. On the other hand, you have to know it's there to look for and see it, because the story moves so swiftly and so confidently that there's little time to sputter over the details. (Not even when the whole thing is slowed considerably by commercial interruptions and opportunity for discussion, the only way I was able to see it for many years.)

It's frequently heralded as no less than the greatest screenplay ever written, and while it's hard to know exactly how to judge such things, I have little problem with the label. It works at practically every level, from the broadest building blocks of its story—Nazi Germany, Vichy France, isolationist America, and Casablanca itself—right down to individual lines of dialogue, which are so peppered through with wit and sparkling repartee (all of it advancing the plot constantly) that it can leave one almost breathless.

The last time I looked I found myself furiously scribbling down as many as I could, trying to keep up: "I don't mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one." "Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to invade." "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." "It doesn't take a lot to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

And those are just some of the choice lines individual characters get. Even better are the many, many moments of back and forth between them, such as when Signor Ferrari (played by Sydney Greenstreet)—who owns and operates a competing nightclub, the Blue Parrot—renews an evidently standing offer to buy the club that belongs to Rick and in which most of the action of the picture occurs. Rick turns him down and Signor Ferrari then asks, equally routinely by all signs, about the piano player (played by Dooley Wilson) who provides the entertainment at Rick's: "What do you want for Sam?" "I don't buy or sell human beings," says Rick (incidentally underlining the Huck and Jim nature of the relationship between Rick and Sam). "Too bad," says Ferrari. "That's Casablanca's leading commodity."

It's true that the picture hardly escapes some of its outdated values—I wince every time I see it when Ilsa first arrives at Rick's and asks, in reference to Sam, about "the boy who is playing the piano." And for many years it was almost as hard to watch what I viewed as Ilsa's abject capitulation to the Big Strong Men in her life in the second half, at one point burying her head in Rick's shoulder and mewling, "Oh, I don't know what's right any more. You'll have to think for both of us. For all of us."

Yet even that stubborn perception moved some the last time I looked. It's not actually hard to read it, the way Bergman plays it, as potentially just one more calculation being made by just one more character among many trying to think their ways around an impossible situation. It's pretty clear that Rick is the one she loves, or at least that that is what the screenplay intends us to see, but not entirely so. And it's a price, this ambiguity, I'm happy to pay.

In fact, I don't think I've ever enjoyed the final sequence as much as I did on my most recent look at it again. Whereas before I have typically found the first half of Casablanca the most compelling, through to the end of the flashback sequence, and from that point have seen the story losing its way in complexities attempting to sort themselves out, this last time it looked a little different. It's almost as if it revels in its own various confusions for their own sakes, playing each one in turn for all it's worth and then moving on to the next overlay of interpretation.

Each feint toward one resolution or another reconfigures and snaps all the characters and motivations into a new mosaic, like the various body pieces of a disassembled and reassembling figure in a Warner Brothers cartoon: mad activity, a stop for focus on what we have, no that's not right, and so mad activity again. The result is that, even as events move impossibly fast, the effect is of a great and thoughtful deliberation, enabling us to savor everything about it all the more. And I find that I still enjoy a beautiful friendship with this movie after all.