CASABLANCA VI – Review
Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca
CASABLANCA V d: Michael Curtiz
In his essay ‘Casablanca, or, The Cliches Are Having a Ball‘ writer-philosopher Umberto Eco states:
‘Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control. And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making. For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it. And so we can accept it when characters change mood, morality, and psychology from one moment to the next, when conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation if a spy is approaching, when whores weep at the sound of ‘La Marseillaise.’ When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.’
Note that in his summation of a critique that Casablanca is mediocre, Eco
- makes absurd claims about the film’s ‘intertextuality’ (a weasel approach that bad critics toss around to cover up the fact they are saying nothing of real import) arising from its use of clichés, something that does not add up in a synergistic way to anything better,
- throws in a throwaway and nonsensical word like ‘telluric,’ as if it had deeper meaning (it only means terrestrial), and
- repeats the quasi-Stalinist dictum on clichés, only to end his review praising the film — a touch of creeping Political Correctness that utterly reveals his essay as bunkum of the highest order.
Let me bring this all back down to earth with a realistic assessment of the film, as opposed to the emotionally whitewashed views of Ebert and other ‘pop’ critics, and the intellectually masturbatory views of Eco and a few other ‘academic’ critics. Casablanca, like any other film, rises and falls on its screenplay. To co-opt a metaphor, a screenplay is to a film what a good ground game is to an army. The visuals are merely the ’shock and awe’ that bombing and high-tech assaults bring. That never wins a war; the ground game does; going house to house to clear a street does. Film, despite being thought of as a visual medium, is really a narrative form that merely uses images to enhance the narrative. Heresy that it may be, film is utterly dependent upon narrative. This is why the medium is called ‘motion pictures,’ not ‘pictured motions.’ The emphasis on the movement in the term ‘motion pictures’ is not literally on the images, but on the narrative aspect.
As I’ve shown, there are many flaws in Casablanca’s narrative; among them the fact that it is melodrama — driven by plot not character development. All the characters react to what the plot dictates; the plot does not organically flow from their personae. Now, before you claim, ‘But it’s a war film,’ let me state: It’s not, it’s a romance set in war, but even were it a war film, just look at the greatest of war films; all of them are driven by characters, not plots.
Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory has its dramatic tension not because of the trench warfare, but because of the force of Kirk Douglas‘ colonel and the reactions of the doomed men he commanded. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is driven by the conflicting wills of the wholly scrutinized Martin Sheen character, and the ghost-like persona of the little-seen Marlon Brando character. Apocalypse Now could have been set in any war; it could have been a spy film, a gangster film, or any other genre because its conflict is man vs. man, or more specifically, one man vs. one man. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line is also wholly structured on the subjective views of a few characters as parallaxed by one character (the narrator) during the Pacific Theater of World War Two. In it, the war is a subservient element to the personal growth of the characters fighting it. So, there are no excuses for Casablanca’s trite plot, period.
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