CASABLANCA Review Pt.2 – Paul Henreid

Paul Henreid, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Humphrey Bogart in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca

CASABLANCA Review Part I

Once again, this is not to say that the Casablanca screenplay — credited to Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch — lacks charm; the comic scenes in the film, such as those involving the pickpocket, are good, but compare them with the deeper and blacker humor of some of the scenes in Stanley Kubrick's far superior Paths of Glory; for instance, the sequence where one of the condemned men moans of the unfairness that a fly buzzing about him will be alive the next day and he won't, so another of the prisoners kills the fly and remarks that the prisoner now has it over the fly. The contrast in screenwriting quality is stark.

But the flaws in terms of character development and the subsequent narrative that flows from it do not all stem from the screenplay. It is also the result of acting that mostly ranges from mediocre to downright bad. First, let's go with the performances of some of the leading characters, and let me start by stating that most of the critical assessment of the acting abilities of the Casablanca cast is often quite wrongheaded.

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.

Yet, from a purely technical standpoint Henreid gives, by far, the best performance of the trio. But because it is the most understated, 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 starkly positive contrast to Rick's cartoonish, caveman-like refusal to utter such declarations. Furthermore, Victor shows his love for Ilsa throughout the film, while Rick's love is displayed only in the final scene; even then, 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 Casablanca — heroically, romantically, and dramatically (especially in contrast to the 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 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 Paul Henreid's characterization, one need only watch the cheesy scene in the bar, where Victor hears the Nazis singing "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.