We'll Always Have Paris! Or Conakry! Or Wichita!

Continuing the tireless struggle of Catching Up With Movies I Should Have Seen By 21, I snuggled up with my paramour (if one's teddy bear can be considered a paramour and why not I say) to sit down and watch the DVD of Casablanca. Directed by Michael Curtiz with a barrel of screen writers, Casablanca is possibly one of the few movies that have completely penetrated human psyche so that people who may never had seen it in their life still quote Here's looking at you kid or Play it again, Sam (which as I'm sure you're all aware, is never actually said in the movie but comes from a parody version).

The story is essentially a love triangle between the nonchalant, almost nihilistic Rick Blaine (Humphrey B Bear... no wait, I mean Bogart), Ilsa, the beautiful woman who always seems to backlit with gauze effects (Ingrid Bergman) and her straight backed heroic Resistance fighter husband Victor (Paul Henreid). Throw in a truckload of Nazis (led by Conrad Veidt- who was in fact Jewish), a buxom guitar player and a host of wacky characters including a shady kasbah owner (Sydney Greenstreet). My favourite though has to be the camp fop, Prefect of Police Captain Louis Renault, as played by Claude Rains.

Running parallel to the love story is the war in Europe, and Casablanca as a desperate landing stage for refugees fleeing to the United States. This gives Casablanca the chance to have Nazis running around and carelessly getting themselves shot- it also saves the time of formulating a villain as who needs a villain when you've got Nazis.


Wacky Movie Trivia Diversion: I couldn't find anywhere else to put this logically so it here it is straight-up: When filming the final scene at the airfield, the producers couldn't afford a real plane. So they built a cardboard cutout and to make the airport workers to scale, they hired midgets.

I have to confess it took me a while to 'click' to this movie as for the first forty-five minutes I sat there thinking "why is this so crash hot when it's such a soapy melodrama?". Then it dawned on me that this was the numero uno of soapy melodramas, the one which set the way for thousands of tearjerkers to come. It was only then I was able to fully appreciate it. Rain smearing the text of a goodbye letter? Casablanca did it first.

Renault, aside from his comedic value, is also an important symbol of Vichy France in 1942... a puppet of Major Strasser in Casablanca but there is also a deep distrust and dislike of the Germans. When the war ended is he a hero or a collaborator? Ugarte is the Profiteer, Ilsa is Old Europe whilst Victor is obviously the Resistance.

Continuing along the themes (so popular to those high school essays "Discuss the Themes and Characters in Casablanca/Hamlet/Brave New World), Rick could be said to represent the US' stance towards WW2. He begins as an isolationist, still hurting from WW1 (I don't stick my neck out for nobody) but then he becomes very much an Anti-Nazi interventionist.

On a more grown up level, whilst America was officially strictly neutral about 'the phoney war' in Europe, Hollywood most definitely was not. Casablanca's studio Warner Brothers was one of the few studios to pull out of Germany when Hitler came to power. Jack Warner had been in severe trouble a few years earlier for his movie Confessions of a Nazi Spy in which he was accused by the isolationist Congress of the time that he was war-mongering-

...to represent Hitler... as a blood thirsty persecutor and nothing else is manifestly unfair, considering his phenomenal public career, his unchallenged political and social achievement... (Production Code Review for Confessions of a Nazi Spy).

This wasn't just Congress though- Warner received personal bomb threats for such an open attack on Hitler.

When America eventually entered the war, suddenly Anti-Hitler was obviously in vogue. The Bureau of Motion Pictures (the government agency which ensured movies were a gentle form of propaganda to 'sell' the war) gave Casablanca a perfect score- it after all showed conquering the Germans, and America as a refuge for the oppressed. However, some schools of thought believe that Casablanca, in furthering America, presents a rather dismal picture of its European allies- Victor is quite an unlikeable hero and the Resistance is shown as badly organised and fearful. Continuing along this renegade train of thought, Rick is the America which America wanted to be in WW2... the swaggering, golden hero who came into Europe only because Europe couldn't look after itself.

Whether you buy into that or not is really relevant, as at the core of Casablanca is a ripping good story. Who wouldn't be moved by the scene of the entire club joining La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazi anthem?

Now that I've finally seen this movie so many parodies make sense- Peter Lorre's scheming, slimy Ugarte had been spoofed so many times without me realising what was being spoofed. The DVD version, by the way, is in impeccable quality and the image is crisp and crystal clear.

This is one of those movies everyone should be made to see at least once in their life.