Casablanca is a 1942 movie set during World War II in the Vichy-controlled Moroccan city of Casablanca. The film was directed by Michael Curtiz, and stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa. It focuses on Rick's conflict between, in the words of one character, love and virtue: he must choose between his love for Ilsa and his need to do the right thing by helping her husband, Resistance hero Victor Laszlo, escape from Casablanca and continue his fight against the Nazis.
The film was an immediate hit, and it has remained consistently popular ever since. Critics have praised the charismatic performances of Bogart and Bergman, the chemistry between the two leads, the depth of characterisation, the taut direction, the witty screenplay and the emotional impact of the work as a whole.
Essential Classics - Romances (Gone with the Wind / Casablanca / Doctor Zhivago)
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Humphrey Bogart - The Signature Collection, Vol. 1 (Casablanca Two-Disc Special Edition / The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Two-Disc Special Edition / They Drive by Night / High Sierra)
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The Bogart Collection (Casablanca/The Maltese Falcon/To Have and Have Not/The Big Sleep/The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
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The Humphrey Bogart Collection (The Big Sleep/The Maltese Falcon/Casablanca/Key Largo)
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Best Picture Collection - Epic Dramas (Casablanca/Gone With the Wind/Ben-Hur)
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Casablanca / Maltese Falcon (Two-Pack)
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Best Picture Oscar Collection - Drama (Amadeus/Casablanca Special Edition/Driving Miss Daisy/The Life of Emile Zola/Mrs. Miniver)
Plot Description
Humphrey Bogart plays Rick Blaine, the owner of an upscale cafe/bar/gambling den in the Morocco city of Casablanca which attracts a mixed clientele of Vichy French and Nazi officials, refugees and thieves. Rick is a bitter and cynical man, but still displays a clear dislike for the fascist part of his clientele.
The plot begins when a petty crook, Guillermo Ugarte (Peter Lorre), arrives in Rick's club with "letters of transit". The papers are signed by a high-ranking Vichy official, and allow the bearer to travel at will around Nazi-controlled Europe, including to neutral Lisbon, Portugal, whereupon one may catch a clipper to the United States. These papers are almost priceless to any of the continual stream of refugees attempting to escape the unoccupied French possession, and Ugarte plans on making his fortune by selling them to the highest bidder, who was due to arrive at the club that night, then buying his way out of Casablanca. However, he murdered their German carriers to get them, and is captured and killed by the local police, under the order of the Chief of Police, Captain Renault (Claude Rains), who is corrupt yet ambivalent about the Nazi presence in Casablanca. Unbeknowst to Renault or the Nazi command, Ugarte had secretly left the letters with Rick for safe-keeping.
In walks the reason for Rick's bitterness, his ex-lover Ilsa Lund (Bergman), who arrives in the club after being told the papers are available for sale. Her husband, Victor Laszlo (Henreid), is an important Resistance leader from Czechoslovakia with a massive price on his head, and he needs the letters to escape. Rick believes that Ilsa deceived him earlier, when she appeared to be in love with him, yet left him for Laszlo. In fact she was already married to Laszlo when she first knew Rick, but believed that he was dead. When she discovered that her husband was alive, she returned to him, despite her love for Rick.
A group of German officers around the piano sing the Wacht am Rhein, a German patriotic song from the nineteenth century (the producers wanted to use the Nazi Horst Wessel Lied, but it was copyrighted by a German publisher). Laszlo, incensed, tells the house band to play La Marseillaise. The customers join in and drown out the Germans, who then order the club to be closed.
Despite initially refusing to give the documents to Ilsa, even at gunpoint, Rick eventually chooses to help the couple leave Casablanca. His own moral code is shown as being strong enough to allow him to do the right thing, regardless of his own feelings for Ilsa, with whom he earlier reconciles. Captain Renault is complicit in their escape, and after the couple fly out of Casablanca and Rick has shot Major Strasser, he suggests they both also leave and join the Free French. Just before making this suggestion, Renault throws a bottle of Vichy water in the bin. [top]
Awards
Casablanca won three Oscars:
Academy Award for Best Picture — Hal B. Wallis, producer
Academy Award for Directing — Michael Curtiz
Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay — Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch
It was also nominated for another five Oscars:
Academy Award for Best Actor — Humphrey Bogart
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — Claude Rains
Academy Award for Best Cinematography, black-and-white — Arthur Edeson
Academy Award for Film Editing — Owen Marks
Academy Award for Original Music Score — Max Steiner
In 1989 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, while in 1998 it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the second greatest American film (after Citizen Kane). [top]
Critics' Opinions
Roger Ebert has claimed that the film is "probably on more lists of the greatest films of all time than any other single title, including Citizen Kane", because of its wider appeal; while Citizen Kane is "greater", Casablanca is more loved. Behlmer also emphasises the variety in the picture: "it’s a blend of drama, melodrama, comedy [and] intrigue". Ebert says that he has never heard of a negative review of the film, even though individual elements can be criticised (he cites the unrealistic special effects and the stiff character/portrayal of Laszlo).
Ebert has also said that the film is popular because "the people in it are all so good". As the Resistance hero, Laszlo is ostensibly the most good, although Ebert comments that he is so stiff that he is hard to like. The other characters, in Rudy Behlmer's words, are "not cut and dried": they come into their goodness in the course of the film. Renault begins the film as a collaborator with the Nazis, who extorts sexual favours from refugees and has Ugarte killed in custody. Rick, according to Behlmer, is "not a hero, ... not a bad guy": he does what is necessary to get along with the authorities and "sticks his neck out for nobody". Even Ilsa, the least active of the main characters, is "caught in the emotional struggle" over which man she really loves. By the end of the film, however, "everybody is sacrificing".
A dissenting note comes from Umberto Eco, who wrote that "by any strict critical standards... Casablanca is a very mediocre film". He sees the changes the characters undergo as inconsistency rather than complexity: "It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects". However, he argues that it is this inconsistency which accounts for the film's popularity by allowing it to include a whole series of archetypes: unhappy love, flight, passage, waiting, desire, the triumph of purity, the faithful servant, the love triangle, beauty and the beast, the enigmatic woman, the ambiguous adventurer and the redeemed drunkard. Central is the idea of sacrifice: "the myth of sacrifice runs through the whole film". [top]
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