CASABLANCA d: Michael Curtiz
Casablanca (1942)
Direction: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch; from Murray Burnett and Joan Alison’s unproduced play "Everybody Comes to Rick’s"
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, S. Z. Sakall, Dooley Wilson, Joy Page
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
About three years ago, I finally gave in to watch It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) for the first time. I had hesitated because of the five- and ten-minute snippets of the film I had seen, and for its reputation as a hokey Christmas story ‘chestnut.’ Well, was I wrong, for It’s a Wonderful Life is a truly great film — arguably the best Frank Capra ever made. It is also a good example of the auteur theory of filmmaking, in that the film fits remarkably well within the Capra canon. From the first five minutes the viewer knows that no one but Frank Capra could have directed it.
With that in mind, I decided to finally give in and watch Casablanca from start to finish. Like It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s a film from the 1940s (1942 to be exact) whose hold on audiences has not abated. However, unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca often turns up in the Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time lists — and this is wrong. After all, while Casablanca is a good film (I’d give it a 75-80 score out of 100), it is nowhere near greatness for reasons technical, aesthetic, and artistic. I will explain them in this essay in order to demonstrate that while the film is likable, likability and greatness are wholly different qualities — be they applied to a work of art, an idea, or just the execution of a plan.
Before I summarize the well-known plot of Casablanca, let me detail some of its strengths and weaknesses, which I will expound upon later, and offer reasons why many critics have missed the boat on many aspects of the film.
First off, director Michael Curtiz (who also directed the James Cagney vehicles Angels with Dirty Faces and Yankee Doodle Dandy), while a good studio man, was in no way an auteur. Take It’s a Wonderful Life or The Third Man, and one can clearly see stylistic continuity from those films to others in the auteur’s canon. This includes dialogue, visuals, character development, editing, scoring, etc. Watch scenes from any earlier Capra film and one can easily see that George Bailey, the Jimmy Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life would be perfectly at home in them. The same is true with the visual motifs in The Third Man (and for these purposes I regard the true auteur of that film as Orson Welles not Carol Reed, a journeyman filmmaker with an anomic style and canon akin to Curtiz’s). As for Casablanca, there’s no continuity when compared to Curtiz’s other efforts.
Next, there is the film’s lack of ‘vision.’ In short, it is not in the least bit poetic like the works of true masters such as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Theo Angelopoulos, Michelangelo Antonioni, or Stanley Kubrick. Casablanca is a good, solid-prose movie, but there is no higher meaning to it. This flaw, if you will, is revealed by the fact that virtually all the characters in it are, to be generous, archetypes (if not full-blown stereotypes), and this one-dimensionality makes much of what occurs in the story predictable. This is not to say that this predictability is not well handled, but from the moment Humphrey Bogart’s and Ingrid Bergman’s eyes first meet, you know that theirs is destined to be a doomed romance. Why? Because that’s the way Hollywood formula works with dark, brooding anti-heroes, and angelic (almost Madonna-like) heroines. The hows and wherefores are minor in comparison to the knowledge that these two characters will not end up together.
Now, compare the relationship, as portrayed by Bogart and Bergman, to that of other romantic film couples — from schlock like Love Story (which also uses the doomed-love trope) to deeper investigations of human relationships as portrayed in, say, Michelangelo Antonioni’s great films of the sixties. True, Casablanca is both propaganda and melodrama, and these are all fine and dandy reasons to explain why there is not a good deal of depth in the characterizations and resultant relationships, but … an explanation is not an excuse for a flaw. With a bit better writing, a few more moments to flesh out some complexities, a few off-handed bits of ‘accidental’ poesy or philosophy, and the loss of some of the dramatically and emotionally absurd moments in the film (such as the phony scene where Bergman threatens Bogart with a gun, or the cringe-inducing jingoism of the forced — and too stagy — scene where German soldiers and French refugees do battle with patriotic songs), the screenplay, which according to historical reports was written haphazardly, would have been more bearable.
This is not to say that the screenplay — credited to Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch — lacks charm; the comic scenes in Casablanca, e.g., those involving the pickpocket, are good, but compare them with the deeper and blacker humor of some of the scenes in a far superior film like Paths of Glory (e.g., 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 ranges from mediocre to 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. 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.
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Tags: Casablanca, Classic Movies, Claude Rains, Film Reviews, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Oscar 1943, Oscar Movies, Paul Henreid, Romantic Movies
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3 Responses to “CASABLANCA d: Michael Curtiz”
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I think Casablanca is one of the most abysmally boring movies ever made. The only think even remotely great about that film is Ingrid Bergman’s face. Casablanca being ranked as the greatest film “of all time” is one of the purest examples of cowardly people afraid of expressing their own opinions.
I love Claude Rains, and Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in casablanca and everything else they’ve done.
Well, you certainly know your film criticism, but YOU JUST DON’T GET IT. ” Casablanca” is agit-prop which transcends the limitations of its genre, made shortly after Pearl Harbor, when it looked like the Nazis might win. It’s as unfair to fault it for not having the emotional distance of postwar films like “Paths of Glory” or ” It’s a Wonderful Life” as it is to criticize “Birth of a Nation” for being politically incorrect by the standards of 2009.
You come across as someone who is either too young or too cynical to have suffered to defend your principles, and your inability to grasp the dueling national anthems scene is what gives you away. Speaking as the daughter of a veteran, someone who saw her high school classmates drafted, and who spent years doing relief and development work in Africa, I feel your different history makes it hard for you to understand the film.
Performing a banned national anthem is a political act of great courage, because IT CAN GET YOU KILLED ON THE SPOT. And Curtiz the Hungarian emigré understood this. He made good use of music to advance the story, just as the contrasting musical styles and rhythms in “Battle of Algiers” reveal the different goals and world views of the French and Algerians.
I agree with you about Henreid’s acting but disagree about the others. I’m sure you know Bergman was directed to “play it down the middle,” since the screenplay was being written just a day ahead of the shooting. But I think what you see as limitations are Curtiz’s choices,again informed by his experience. The actors are meant to be icons: Elsa symbolizes Occupied Europe, Rick is the USA – and thus uncertain about the depth of his commitment until the end. The same is true for the rest of the cast.
Just as “Liberty Leading the People” is both propaganda and a remarkable painting and “The Marseillaise” is a genuinely stirring national anthem, “Casablanca” is a war movie and yet so much more. Watch a contemporary newsreel and then give it another chance.