Casablanca
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NOTE: This page was copy pasted from the Greatest Movies Wiki on Miraheze.
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1989. | ||
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 "The fundemental things apply, dun, as time goes by!"
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Casablanca is a 1942 American romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz based on Murray Burnett and Joan Alison's unproduced stage play Everybody Comes to Rick's. The film stars Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid; it also features Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Dooley Wilson. The film premiered in Untied States theaters on January 23 with a Looney Tunes short called Confusions of a Nutzy Spy starring Porky Pig.
Why It Rocks
- For two generations the film stood as the definite American movie romance, build on regret and a new awareness of how world events impacted individuals. Even though its reputation had dimmed in recent years with World War II memories fading, the film's many great quotes originated from this movie and gauzy clinches continue to be used to this day.
- There are multiple different ways for viewers to interpret the film which tend to vary depending to the generation: a stand against fascism, an example of star machinery, proof (or refutation) of the auteur theory. On more fundamental levels, the film shows better than many films exactly how the studio system worked.
- Many A-List celebrities for the time, a combination of contact and independent actors, including bona fide star Humphrey Bogart, alongside Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid – all of whom had previous been in well-known films – Dooley Wilson and Ingrid Bergman.
- Bergman’s hesitancy in her acting ended up contributing to the film’s sense of impermanence, of a world changing for the worse.
- Several of Casablanca’s supporting actors were real European émigrés who had been persecuted by the Nazis and escaped to America. The most remarkable story belonged to married couple Marcel Dalio (Emil the croupier) and Madeleine LeBeau (Yvonne). In June 1940, they escaped Paris hours before the Germans invaded, making their way to Bordeaux and Lisbon, where they eventually procured Chilean visas. On a stopover in Mexico, the visas were found to be forgeries, and the pair faced deportation until Canada offered them asylum and they were able to enter the United States. Back in France, meanwhile, the Nazis were using a photo of Dalio, a prominent French actor, to exhibit “typical” Jewish features to the populace. The couple's saga is one reason why LeBeau's tearful close-up while singing “La Marseillaise” is so vivid and powerful. Her tears—and passion—are genuine.
- The screenplay is a model of layered, economical storytelling and witty dialogue that has long since entered American culture as perhaps the most quoted script in history, from “Here’s looking at you, kid” to “Round up the usual suspects.”
- The pacing by Michael Curtiz blends comedy and suspense, romance and cynicism, into an astonishingly fluid whole that helps the movie feel fresh and modern, even after repeat viewings.
- The signature song, “As Time Goes By,” was written in 1931 but had never been especially successful until it was incorporated into this film, performed by Dooley Wilson, and used to help evoke the longing and melancholy that perfectly express Casablanca's timeless romanticism.
- While the doomed romance between Rick and Ilsa gives the film a tragic appeal, what really won over viewers was Rick's transformation from a disinterested, apathetic bystander to a committed patriot. It was how moviegoers wanted to believe they would act in similar circumstances.
- A major reason the film may have resonated so well with the public was due to the film being given a limited release just days after Allied forces invaded the city of Casablanca. The film got an additional boost during its general release some five months later when the city hosted an Allied summit with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin.
- While various modern day viewers may criticize the film's illogical ending (Rick killing the Nazi officer who invades Casablanca, sacrificing his own happiness to save Ilsa's marriage and walking off arm-and-arm with his old foe Renault), some additional viewers argued that this was intentional since logic had been portrayed as the enemy or the modern invention that has frozen our hearts, allowed war to flourish, and alienated us from the deeper togetherness that we once knew. It's the cognitive effect of the film's ending; a mood of sentimental return that defies logic so we could recover a lost utopian love.
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