We all know Casablanca is a great movie — but what makes it great? We talked to film professor Julian Cornell about why Casablanca is one of the classic love stories in cinema.
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Transcript provided by Youtube:
00:06
We often hear that Casablanca is one of the greatest movies ever made, but why?
00:11
What’s so great about Casablanca?
00:13
Julian Cornell, professor of film studies at New York University, explains,
00:17
Michael Curtiz is from Casablanca.
00:20
I think it’s one of those films you can hold up as an example of the virtues of the classical Hollywood style.
00:24
It’s an example of popular entertainment that’s also art, but it’s in no way pretentious.
00:29
It clearly is a work of art, but it never says to you, this is a work of art.
00:33
The film is set during World War II, just before Pearl Harbor in 1941.
00:38
It’s unclear which direction the world will go as America stalls on deciding whether to enter the war.
00:44
Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine becomes the embodiment of America itself.
00:48
His final decision to take action and fight for the common good,
00:51
abandoning his isolationist stance, is a clear metaphor for the US’s wake up call and entry into the war.
00:57
Ex-lovers Rick and Ilsa cross paths in the wartime purgatory of Casablanca, Morocco,
01:02
while the German hold is tightening.
01:04
We’re viewing the global citizenry through the lens of the American expat,
01:07
but around him is a melee of all sorts of temporary refugees.
01:11
Everybody’s stuck, waiting to get out.
01:13
The rotating searchlight wanders around and around,
01:16
illuminating at random, not finding anything.
01:19
The uncertain fates of this melting pot of people reflect the state of the world in the middle of the struggle.
01:24
Among the movie’s audience, too,
01:26
no one yet knows who will prevail, who will be the lucky ones,
01:30
and if society will emerge with any of its morals, values, or dignity intact.
01:35
Ilsa’s and Rick’s love story aligns with the timing of the war.
01:38
Early shots of the romance in pre-occupied Paris show the two in their own, intimate world.
01:43
But this oblivious bliss is brutally cut short by the German tanks crashing in,
01:47
the cruel world announcing it will no longer be ignored.
01:50
In the plot, we later learn this is also when Ilsa finds out that Laszlo is still alive.
01:55
But the matched timing makes it feel as if it’s the Germans, the horror of the war, that separates the two.
02:01
We’re already involved in World War II when the film comes out,
02:03
But already, by the time the film is released, people are beleaguered.
02:06
How do you maintain a commitment when the world is literally falling apart?
02:10
How do you maintain a commitment?
02:11
How do you maintain a connection with other people?
02:13
If you think about the story of Rick and Ilsa, it’s one of the iconic movie romances,
02:17
but the couple doesn’t get together.
02:19
Rick and Ilsa don’t end up together at the end, because there’s something more important.
02:22
What’s more important is that notion of commitment itself.
02:25
The notion of the world, and your responsibility to the community.
02:29
“Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble.
02:30
But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
02:38
Casablanca is a film about morality.
02:41
It’s asking the question, should we go on striving to be good people, to fight the good fight?
02:46
When darker shadows are overtaking society,
02:49
this moral question is embodied in Rick.
02:51
What he’s great at doing, in this particular film,
02:54
is conveying the sense of a man who’s been broken, who was once an idealist,
02:59
but is now a cynic,
03:01
and the cynicism is cover for his romanticism.
03:03
The exchanges between Rick and the true cynic, Captain Renault,
03:06
an unapologetic opportunist who cares for no cause,
03:10
elaborate directly on this theme.
03:12
“Because, my dear Ricky, I suspect that under that cynical shell,
03:15
you’re at heart a sentimentalist.”
03:17
And the film’s plot converges on Rick’s moral dilemma.
03:20
Does he choose love and his personal happiness,
03:22
insuring the death of Victor Laszlo, the light of the cause of the resistance,
03:26
or does he give up his true love forever for the good of the world, and the work only Laszlo can do?
03:32
Of course, Rick’s final choice reveals his true character, once and for all.
03:37
“…in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Laszlo.”
03:43
Cinematographer Arthur Edison’s noir- and expressionism-inspired lighting
03:47
visualizes the weary mind of a world at war.
03:49
Rick is usually shown in noirish side lighting: half light and half dark,
03:54
representing his split self at a crossroads as he chooses between his idealistic and cynical selves.
03:59
Shadows on Bergman’s Ilsa, too, shows she’s equally torn between love and duty.
04:04
The intrusive lines on their faces look like prison bars,
04:07
reflecting that Rick and Ilsa are trapped by circumstance,
04:10
unable to pursue their love.
04:12
The light on Ilsa’s face is meanwhile given a remarkably soft look,
04:15
through the use of gauze to make her skin look flawless,
04:18
as well as to emotionally evoke love, nostalgia, and regret on her face.
04:23
Tiny lights even lend her eyes an impossible sparkle.
04:26
Comparatively, Laszlo is lit brightly, to suggest that he’s a bright light of inspiration to those around him.
04:32
He has the incandescent, unshadowed face of a man who never doubts his firm faith in his calling.
04:38
As Rick and Laszlo talk in Rick’s office, Rick’s face is part in shadow,
04:42
whereas it looks as if a special beam of light shines on Laszlo.
04:45
Even when Elsa talks of Laszlo and his inspirational work,
04:48
a subtle light flashes over her.
04:52
Perhaps the most important secret to Casablanca’s greatness is the key to most great movies.
04:58
The writing.
04:58
A sign that a movie is important is that we can quote from it, even if you’ve never seen the movie.
05:03
“Round up the usual suspects.”
05:04
“Play as time goes by.”
05:07
“Here’s looking at you, kid.”
05:09
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…
05:13
…she walks into mine.”
05:15
Based on an unproduced play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the adapted screenplay was a team effort.
05:20
It illuminates deep truths about human existence,
05:23
reveals character, advances plot,
05:25
and speaks to the social context as America entered the war.
05:29
This is pretty much everything a screenplay could ever be asked to do,
05:32
and we barely noticed the philosophy lesson since we’re so entertained.
05:36
Because Casablanca is such a critically acclaimed classic,
05:39
we might forget that it’s chock-full of hokey melodrama.
05:43
Writer Julius Epstein said it had
05:44
“more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined, but when corn works, there’s nothing better.”
05:50
Umberto Eco notes the irony that the film boils down to a mash-up of cliches.
05:54
He points out, “Two cliches make us laugh.
05:56
A hundred cliches move us.
05:58
For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion.”
06:04
Still, the filmmakers didn’t expect Casablanca to become such an iconic classic.
06:09
Warner Brothers rushed the November 1942 Premiere,
06:11
in order to take advantage of publicity around the Allied Invasion of North Africa, a few weeks earlier.
06:21
Director Michael Curtiz wasn’t even the first choice.
06:24
That was Roman Holiday’s William Wyler.
06:26
But while Curtiz is held up as the anti-Auteur,
06:29
his direction tends to not get enough credit.
06:32
Curtiz is definitely underrated, but if you look at his filmography, it’s like one classic after another.
06:37
And very often, what you find is he’s taking the parameters of a genre
06:43
and finding the artistic potential in them.
06:45
It’s a wonderful example of narrative economy.
06:47
There wasn’t a detail introduced by Curtiz that doesn’t matter.
06:50
An example of this is the scene at the beginning of the film,
06:53
where they “round up the usual suspects,” another phrase that we are familiar with from Casablanca.
06:58
There’s a couple that turn their heads and watch the plane move, and they say,
07:01
“Perhaps tomorrow we’ll be on the plane.”
07:03
Those two characters become central to the story,
07:06
because it proves to Renault when Rick helps them that he’s been right all along,
07:11
that Rick is an idealist. He sees them in need, he can’t just look away, he has to do something.
07:17
And you reflect back. You’re like wait, that’s the couple from the beginning of the movie,
07:20
and here they are again.
07:21
The other thing is he does mix genres at a time when you typically didn’t do that.
07:25
There’s a lot of film noir elements. There’s a lot of German expressionist elements.
07:28
There’s obviously melodrama.
07:30
The film even has documentary elements.
07:32
Then, there are the performances.
07:35
Humphrey Bogart is one of those actors, that,
07:36
if you see one of his movies, you could think he’s always playing himself.
07:39
But watch his performance in Casablanca, how detailed it is.
07:42
He’s very meticulous about his performance,
07:45
and that’s why it’s so memorable, because it’s very precise.
07:48
Bogey and Bergman prove actors can play falling in love with just a look.
07:52
As Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa listens to As Time Goes By for the first time,
07:57
watch how she takes us somewhere far away.
08:00
It’s just a subtle movement of her eyes.
08:02
Paul Henreid’s Laszlo, who seems at first the oblivious, one-note, holier-than-thou idealist,
08:07
suddenly lets his curtain drop at moments, revealing he’s not missing a beat.
08:12
“I wonder if you know that you’re trying to escape from yourself, and that you’ll never succeed.”
08:17
It’s one of those films that exemplifies the notion there are no small actors, there are only small roles.
08:22
Because every single actor gets one scene to show their stuff,
08:26
and one scene where their character does something important and memorable.
08:34
The pace of the film
08:36
is extraordinary for a film from 1943. It really crackles, it just moves.
08:41
And he doesn’t dwell on shots. Every shot has all of this visual information,
08:44
but you’re not given a lot of time to process it,
08:46
which is why it holds up to repeated viewing, because you’ve missed so much of it.
08:49
And what he basically is doing is showing how dramatic the stakes are at the time.
08:54
Again, the world is literally falling apart, and the pace of the film conveys that urgency.
09:00
[la] La Marseillaise wait hearing
09:02
Hearing Herman Hupfeld’s As Time Goes By
09:05
practically brings us to tears.
09:07
Play it again, Sam.
09:08
Oh, and by the way, that quote’s never actually said verbatim in the movie.
09:13
“If she can stand it, I can.
09:16
Play it.”
09:17
“Still a story without an ending.
09:20
What about now?”
09:21
It’s the wrongness of the world that means true love can’t be together.
09:25
Curtiz’s melodrama bows to documentary.
09:28
The reason Casablanca is perhaps cinema’s best ever love story,
09:31
is that in the end, the love story must be subverted by the painful reality of the external world.
09:36
Casablanca acknowledges there are things more important than true love
09:40
when people are dying in concentration camps.
09:42
Rick’s and Ilsa’s lesson is the one the US has just learned.
09:45
As Rick watches his true love fly away,
09:48
he’s stopped running away from his true self,
09:50
the sentimental idealist.
09:52
For Rick, it’s the beginning of a beautiful self-awareness.
09:56
“Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
10:08
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This post was previously published on Youtube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video