We'll Always Have Casablanca

By LANCE MORROW

It's still the same old story. The Lisbon plane always descends like a kid's toy landing on the living-room rug. Stick-figure Nazis in animal faces (Strasser a wolf, his aide a fat little pig in glasses) come strutting off. That night at Rick's they chorus Die Wacht am Rhein, the stein-swinging bully song that is the Nazis' idea of a good time in a nightclub. The defiantly answering Marseillaise stirs the soul and raises its Pavlovian goose bumps for the 15th time. They still pronounce "exit visa" weirdly: "exit vee-zay."

Casablanca is exactly 40 years old. It opened in New York in late fall, 1942. At the time, the real Germans were locked around Stalingrad, and the French scuttled their fleet in Toulon Harbor rather than surrender it to the Reich. In Hollywood's version, civilization was dressed in an off-white suit: Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid. Henreid is still alive. So, for that matter, is Ronald Reagan, whom Jack Warner originally wanted for the part of Victor. (All wrong, too American, as wholesome as a quart of milk.) But Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains and Conrad Veidt are all dead. The movie they made has achieved a peculiar state of permanence. It has become something more than a classic. It is practically embedded in the collective American unconscious.

What accounts for the movie's enduring charm? Casablanca is, of course, a masterpiece of casting. Not only the leads but the lesser players as well are perfect, each one a small, vivid miracle of type. Fetching up their names is an old game for the trivialist: Sam (Dooley Wilson), the bartender Sascha (Leonid Kinskey), the waiter Carl (S.Z. Sakall), the jilted Yvonne (Madeleine LeBeau), the Bulgarian couple (Joy Page and Helmut Dantine), the pickpocket (Curt Bois), the croupier (Marcel Dalio).

More people know more lines from Casablanca, possibly, than from any other movie. They recite the best ones. They splash around in the sentimentality. They sing along in the way that Churchill used to rumble the lines of Hamlet from his seat in the audience at the Old Vic. They stooge around: imagine Howard Cosell in the part of Rick Blaine and recite the lines in Cosellian cadence: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

The movie is a procession of perfect moments. Its dialogue is an exquisite fusion of the hard-boiled and a shameless, high-cholesterol sentimentality. The lines inspire a laughing, capitulating kind of affection. One cherishes them: What waters? We're in the desert . . . I was misinformed . . . Was that cannonfire? Or was it my heart pounding? . . . Kiss me! Kiss me as though it were the last time! . . . Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By ... I saved my first drink to have with you. . . Round up the usual suspects . . . We'll always have Paris. It has inspired bits of business: Sydney Greenstreet bowing graciously to Ingrid Bergman in the Blue Parrot and then with brutal abstraction swatting a fly, which for the instant becomes the moral equivalent of any refugee in Casablanca. Or the alltime triumphant moment of literal-minded symbol-banging exposition: Claude Rains dropping the bottle of Vichy Water into a wastebasket and giving it a kick, the charming collaborator virtuous at last.

Casablanca is, among other things, a fable of citizenship and idealism, the duties of the private self in the dangerous public world. It is a thoroughly escapist myth about getting politically involved. Perhaps today the escapism overwhelms the idea of commitment. Local TV stations run Casablanca on election nights, so that Americans can avoid watching news reports about their democracy in action.

One can concoct mock-academic theories about Casablanca. One can lay the sweet thing down on a stainless-steel lab table and dissect it with instruments Freudian or anthropological. A doctoral thesis might be written on the astonishing consumption of alcohol and cigarettes in the movie. At that rate, everyone would have died of cirrhosis and lung cancer by V-E day.

Another paper might examine Casablanca as the ultimate rationalization of, and sublimation of, adultery. One woman, two men. Woman has affair with man not her husband. But wait: it's all right, she thought the husband was dead. And these are desperate times, good and evil are clashing everywhere. A woman can get confused.

It is poshlost, as the Russians say, an overheated lunge toward the profound, to think of Casablanca in terms of deeper allegory. Still, it is hard to resist delving for Jungian archetypes, primal transactions of the kind that lurk in, say, the Oedipus story (Here's looking at you, Mom!).

Much of Casablanca's constituency is collegiate anyway. Generations of Harvard students have wandered out of the Brattle Theater in a state of sappy exaltation. The movie's audience is too large to be described as a cult, but the religious vibration in that word may be oddly right.

Semioticians, who study the significance of signs and symbols, have discussed Casablanca as a myth of sacrifice. One can have fun with that. Consider it this way: America is the Promised Land, the place of safety and redemption. Rick Blaine has been cast out of America, for some original sin that is as obscure as the one that cost Adam and Eve their Eden. Rick flees to Europe, which is the fallen world where Evil (the Nazis, Satan) is loose. He meets and beds the widow of Idealism. Idealism (meaning Victor) is dead, or thought dead, but it rises from the grave. Rick, losing Ilsa, falls obliviously into despair and selfishness: "I stick my neck out for nobody." He becomes an idiot in the original Greek sense of the word, meaning someone indifferent to his duties as a citizen.

Rick's Cafe Americain is the state of the stateless. Rick sets himself up as a kind of chieftain or caliph in his isolated, autonomous, amoral fiefdom, where he rules absolutely. Victor and Rick are splintered aspects, it may be, of the same man. Ultimately, the ego rises above mere selfish despair and selfish desire. It is reborn in sacrifice and community: "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill o' beans in this crazy world." Idealism and its bride ascend into heaven on the Lisbon plane; Rick goes off in the fog with Louis, men without women, to do mortal work in this world for the higher cause.

About Casablanca there clings a quality of lovely, urgent innocence. Those who cherish the movie may be nostalgic for moral clarity, for a war in which good and evil were obvious and choices tenable. They may be nostalgic for a long-lost connection between the private conscience and the public world. Casablanca was released three years before the real moment of the fall of the modern world: 1945. That year, the side of good dropped nuclear bombs on cities full of civilians, and the world discovered Auschwitz. We have not yet developed the myths with which to explain such matters.

--By Lance Morrow

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