Casablanca
1942
Directed by Michael Curtiz
It’s one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century…but he never tells her he loves her.
He says, famously, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and a few other lines that are so much a part of the culture, but Rick Blaine never tells Ilsa Lund that he loves her. And yet, we don’t doubt it for a second. The first thing we see is not his love, but his pain. When Ilsa appears in Rick’s Cafe Americaine in the French Moroccan city of Casablanca, we see him lash out in anger and hurt. He remembers everything about her and about their time together in Paris, including how devastated he was when she left him standing in the rain with nothing but a goodbye note. After she leaves he sits down in the darkness, mutters his famous line, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns, she had to walk into mine,” and proceeds to down a bottle of bourbon.
Rick’s love for Ilsa is one of the great, tragic loves of Western cultural history, and the cornerstone of the 1942 film Casablanca. Rick himself is a character of depth and conflict, as compelling today as he was when the film was made in 1942. He tries to be cynical, and his exterior does fool some people, but the truly observant know that he is caring and trustworthy. He turned his back on those things in the wake of the pain of Ilsa’s betrayal, so the Rick we are first introduced to has as his motto, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” and then goes about proving it.
But once Ilsa returns to his life, his facade starts to crack, and it cracks fast. At first, all we see is pain. Ilsa renews her acquaintance with Sam (Dooley Wilson), Rick’s friend and piano player, and asks him to play the song that had had special meaning to her and Rick when they knew each other in Paris. This leads to one of the most famous, if misquoted, lines in the film, “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’”
Rick comes rushing out of his office and snaps at Sam, “I thought I told you never to play–” And then he sees Ilsa. He doesn’t move, his expression doesn’t change, but we see it hit him like a wrecking ball. The next several scenes show Rick at important places in his character development. Unable to handle the pain of seeing Ilsa, he gets drunk, then treats her rudely when she comes to see him. We see a flashback of Rick and Ilsa’s love affair in Paris, when she thought her husband was dead, and the contrast between Rick-then and Rick-now is extraordinary. He was happy and openly in love, unlike his current situation where he hides behind self-interest and cynicism.
After the flashback, Rick sobers up and apologizes to Ilsa, and he seems to think that he has himself under control, when he learns that Ilsa was married to the man she is traveling with, Victor Laszlo, a Hungarian freedom fighter and resistance leader, while they were in love in Paris. He is wounded again, and again retreats into anger and cynicism, but the pieces of his shell can’t all be put back together, and we soon see him fixing the roulette tables in order to help a young Bulgarian couple win enough cash to purchase black-market traveling papers to escape to the US.
The conflict in this Rick-Ilsa-Victor love triangle is rich and complex, because we are sympathetic to all of them. Each man loves Ilsa, and Ilsa loves each of them. Each is a good man; neither of them is abusive or selfish. Both men respect each other, and know full well how the other feels about Ilsa. The only question is whether idealistic Rick or opportunistic Rick will call the shots for the film’s resolution. And the resolution is so perfect, in terms of both love and honor, that it has become one of the most famous, most iconic film scenes of all time.
Through all of that, Rick never tells Ilsa he loves her, but it’s vividly apparent in every look, every wince, every change in posture or vocal tone, and every choice his character makes.
The three leads–Humphrey Bogart as Rick, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa, and Paul Henreid as Victor—give us an exquisite and complex set of relationships, but they are also supported by excellent performances in slightly smaller roles. Chief among these is Claude Rains as Louis, the French police captain who claims to be completely opportunistic, and even jokes about his own proclivities toward self-preservation. Indeed, he’s not wrong about that; he’s hardly a saint. He manipulates and extorts and blackmails and accommodates as well as any Nazi sympathizer ever has, with gracious good humor that masks some real insight into the people around him.
One of the film’s most amusing scenes happens when the visiting Nazi commander orders Louis to shut down Rick’s Cafe, and tells him to make up a reason to do so. Louis immediately blows his whistle and declares the establishment closed until further notice. An angry Rick demands to know what charge is being leveled at him, and Louis responds, “I am shocked—shocked!—to discover that gambling has been going on here!” At that exact moment, a dealer comes up to him and says, “Here are your winnings, Captain.” He says, “Oh thank you,” and pockets his money. But Louis, too, is deeper than he looks, and much of the story hinges on the push and pull between Louis and his better instincts. Louis is there at the climax of the film, making his own choices between self-interest and idealism. Claude Rains earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for this role.
And of course, the film would not have been what it was without Peter Lorre as Ugarte, a small-time black market dealer of travel papers, and Sam, who is not just Rick’s musician but his dear friend. It’s Ugarte who gives the travel papers, upon which the whole plot hinges, into Rick’s keeping. Ugarte also gives Rick the chance to demonstrate his motto, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” when he gets into more trouble than he can get himself out of. And Dooley Wilson as Sam provides the connection between Rick’s past and present, both as a catalyst for memory, and as the player of the soundtrack of Rick’s and Ilsa’s hearts. Sam’s panic when Ilsa first walks into Rick’s gives us our first clue that her presence there is going to be a problem for Rick.
An analysis of this film could go on for many chapters; indeed better film scholars than I have written about Casablanca extensively. There’s enough material here—cinematic, artistic, historic, sociological, psychological, symbolic, and more– to occupy a critic for a long time. I may take a stab at some of it in future articles, but I’ll let it go for now. I would like to point out, though that a preponderance of the 20th century’s best films seem to have been directed by Michael Curtiz. Casablanca is his most famous, and arguably his best, but he also did Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), We’re No Angels (1955), White Christmas (1954), Life With Father (1947), Night and Day (1946), Mildred Pierce (1945), Santa Fe Trail (1940), Captains of the Clouds (1942), and one of the best pro-America war films (and one of the best films in general), Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942, the same year as Casablanca. Curtiz deserves to go down, along with Frank Capra, as one of the great American directors of all time.
