Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca
CASABLANCA Review Part V – DVD: Lauren Bacall Documentary BACALL ON BOGART
Now, the biggest mistake that prevents Casablanca from reaching greatness is its lack of great themes. There is nothing in the film that is so overwhelmingly majestic, technically or performance-wise, that can put it in a class with many of the other highly praised motion pictures of the past. Seen next to Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai, La Dolce Vita, or 2001: A Space Odyssey, Casablanca comes up short, way short.
It lacks Citizen Kane's innovations, acting, and screenplay; it lacks Tokyo Story's characterizations and philosophical depth; it lacks the action, acting, and universal appeal of Seven Samurai; it lacks the acting, humor, and biting social commentary of La Dolce Vita; and it lacks the intellectual probing, audacious screenplay, and mind-blowing presence of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Naturally, most film critics were utterly clueless. Some yahoos have read homosexual and Oedipal subtexts into the film. But it is the unstinting (and often unthinking and uncritical) praise by those who should know better, that is the most silly. I've mentioned a couple of Roger Ebert's missteps in his audio commentary on the DVD, but he, too makes some absurd claims about the film, such as: "Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief." Huh? If anything, Rains' character is portrayed as an opportunistic womanizer.
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 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 pretentious 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.