CASABLANCA II – Paul Henreid
Paul Henreid, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca
Beginning with the three top-billed actors: Humphrey Bogart as club owner Rick Blaine, Ingrid Bergman as his ex-lover Ilsa Lund, and Paul Henreid as Ilsa’s husband, the Czechoslovakian Nazi Resistance outlaw, Victor Laszlo. Virtually all critiques of this trio leave Henreid as the odd man out, mainly because the film focuses on the love angle between Rick and Ilsa. But from a purely technical standpoint, Henreid gives, by far, the best performance of the trio. Because it is the most retrained and understated, however, it usually gets dismissed as stiff acting, rather than good acting of an intentionally stiff character. In many ways, Henreid’s performance reminds me of Masayuki Mori as the murdered samurai husband in Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 drama Rashomon. Like Mori, Henreid conveys emotional depth and complexity with his eyes alone, or even the slight lift of a brow. He is restrained, but this is because his character is über-disciplined.
Victor is a concentration camp escapee and a guerilla fighter who must not draw attention to himself and who must repress his emotions. He is not demonstrative about his feelings for Ilsa, but one need only look at Henreid’s eyes and his physical posture — he’s constantly leaning in toward Ilsa — to see how Victor truly adores his wife. And despite what some critics say, his two-time overt declaration of love for Ilsa stands in stark (positive) contrast to the more cartoonish and caveman-like refusal to utter such words by Bogart’s Rick. Furthermore, Victor shows his love for Ilsa throughout the film, while Rick’s love is displayed only in the final scene, but even Rick’s final gesture is not something that emanates from within.
Why?
Because he ends up doing the very thing that Victor initially suggests to Rick that he is willing to do — to allow Rick to leave Casablanca and take his wife with him, for her own safety!
Why?
Because we never get a moment that we doubt Victor’s love for Ilsa, whereas there is the sneaking suspicion that Rick merely had the hots for Ilsa even if he blew it up into more than what it was.
That not a single critic, to my knowledge, in the nearly seven decades since the film’s release has ever commented on Rick’s final ‘grand and altruistic gesture’ merely being the inverse of Victor’s earlier suggestion, and that this places Victor at the center of the film — heroically, romantically, and dramatically (in contrast to the more puerile Rick and Ilsa) — is further proof that
a) most critics simply are not good enough at their jobs to break down more complex aspects of a work of art, and
b) they too often rely on critically cribbing others in their profession.
This means that a few ‘talking points’ per film are disseminated by the most widely known and read critics, and all the ancillary second- and third-tier critics merely regurgitate the same talking points, supplemented with their own biased, emotion-based yeas or nays on any particular film.
But getting back to Henreid’s characterization, one need only watch the cheesy scene in the bar, where Victor hears the Nazis singing their song, ‘Die Wacht am Rhein,’ and dares to get the band to play ‘La Marseillaise.’ Look at his eyes to see that, far from what critics claim, Victor is a man of great passion and principles from the get-go; this break from his usual restraint gains in power precisely because it is a break, but one that seems wholly natural for a man who has been frustrated for the bulk of his scenes and then feels he is having his face rubbed in it. While the political implications of the bar scene have lost their resonance (as do most blatantly political gestures in art), Henreid’s volcanically restrained performance has not.
As an aside, compare that moment with a similar bit toward the end of the aforementioned Paths of Glory, where a captured German girl is put on stage in front of drunken French soldiers seemingly willing to ravage her, until she starts singing a plaintive German tune of a soldier and his lost love. The drunk soldiers quiet down, and eventually start humming along with the ‘enemy,’ and slowly show that they have not been totally inured by carnage. A comparison of these two scenes (their structure and placement) neatly and clearly shows why Casablanca is mere entertainment while Paths of Glory is great art.
As for Henreid’s performance, it is always more difficult to play a character that is the ‘good guy’ and does not undergo some sort of transformation, however slight; a good critic, however, does not let himself be swayed by a role’s theatrical pyrotechnics. Instead, he focuses on what the actor does with the written material handed him. Thus, Henreid’s character is not only the best portrayed, but it’s also the most subtly nuanced.
Really, does anyone for a moment not believe that Victor knows full well what went on between Ilsa and Rick in Paris and in Casablanca? Of course not, but the character has to pretend not to be affected even if he is — because he has his eyes on the greater prize, the overthrow of the Nazi regime, not the famed ‘hill of beans’ problems of three little people. In short, Henreid’s character, despite having less screen time than Bergman’s and Bogart’s, is the center and lynchpin of the film. Simply stated, without the character of Victor Laszlo (in his physical being and internal composition), Casablanca would not even reach the level of good melodrama.
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