They are in Morocco, with World War II still raging on and the future most uncertain. Ilsa Lund threatens to shoot Rick Blaine in his apartment over Rick’s Café Américain in order to get two letters of transit for herself and her husband Victor Laszlo in Warner Bros.’ classic film (noir). Rick’s response? “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
Rick’s fatalism overall and his response to Ilsa in the scene described above are just two of the many reasons that I think Casablanca, the classic film from Warner Bros., perhaps one of the most famous of the classic films, deserves to be called a film noir. Casablanca is almost universally described as a love story. And that it is, especially from the vantage point of 2023, with World War II fading into the past. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, who play the leads, Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, respectively, became Hollywood stars. For Casablanca, they are remembered for their performances and their on-screen chemistry. Their characters are in love, and their romantic entanglements and complications drive the plot. I have seen Casablanca several times now, however, and the story’s context, its backdrop of wartime sorrow and desperation and its many noir characteristics stand out for me more and more with each viewing.
(This article about Casablanca contains spoilers for both the film adaptation and for its source material, the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s.)
The opening credits roll over a map of Africa. The film cuts to a map of Europe and North Africa, and a voice-over narrator explains the refugee situation in wartime Europe and the journey many are taking to leave their homes: from Paris to Marseille, to Oran, to Casablanca in French Morocco. People are desperate. Shots of a dotted line on the map shows a hypothetical trip to each city, and they are intercut with newsreel footage of real refugees fleeing from the Nazis and the increasing violence. The itinerary described by the narrator emphasizes the many obstacles that stand in their way, with the destination points mentioned just the beginning of a long and arduous journey that many hope will take them to the United States.
The last destination in Africa, Casablanca, is where Rick Blaine runs his Rick’s Café Américain. “I stick my neck out for nobody,” he tells Captain Louis Renault. He repeats these same words when Ugarte is arrested for murder by the French police (that is, the Vichy government) in the café. Viewers learn, after Ilsa’s Lund’s first appearance in the film, that the abrupt end to Rick’s romance with her in Paris before the war is largely responsible for his cynicism, his fatalism, his unwillingness to take a side.
When Ilsa walks into his café one night years after their bitter separation, Rick is astonished. He never thought he would see her again. Her appearance comes with another shock: She is married and in Casablanca with her husband Victor Laszlo, the celebrated resistance fighter who is a legend all over Europe. He and Ilsa need to get out of Casablanca before the Nazis, under the guise of the Vichy government, arrest them both. Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund are now two more members of the swelling refugee population in Casablanca. And their prospects for escape appear to dim as the plot of the film unfolds.
The danger of war and the horrors of becoming a refugee likely would have had a bigger impression on 1942 audiences. The United States had already entered the war, and in fact the Allies invaded French North Africa, including Casablanca, in November 1942. Casablanca was in the news because of war, certainly not because of the film. Two months later, in January 1943, British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt met in Casablanca to discuss military strategy. The release date of the film was pushed up to take advantage of these current events. Viewers at the time knew full well what was at stake.
After much bargaining and under constant fear of betrayal, Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund finally make it to the tiny airport in Casablanca and the plane waiting to fly to Lisbon, Portugal. When they land in Lisbon, they will be safe, and they will be able to continue to the United States. After the plane takes off, Rick Blaine and Captain Renault are left behind on the tarmac, where they discuss the need for both of them to disappear. The Nazis won’t be happy about Victor Laszlo’s escape or about the death of Major Heinrich Strasser. As they stroll away into the fog at the airport, Rick tells Renault, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” It seems to be a happy ending: The lovers have left Casablanca, Victor Laszlo will be able to continue his work fighting the Nazis, and Rick and Renault have time to make their own escape.
Now that I am older and know more about the time period, however, I don’t see the ending of Casablanca as quite so happy anymore. A lot of ambiguity hangs over the final scene. No one in 1942 knew that the Allies would be victorious. Knowledge of the extent of the wartime destruction, the years of suffering during and after the war, and the hard work of rebuilding Europe were still unknowns in 1942.
And then there is the matter of Captain Louis Renault. He has become a patriot, a hero after letting Rick Blaine off the hook for shooting Major Strasser. But Captain Renault had a checkered past in Casablanca. He collaborated with the Nazis when it suited him. He used his position as police captain to trade exit visas for sex and sexual favors. He preyed on women’s desperation. And there was always the chance that he would abuse his power still further by changing his mind at the last minute.
The possibility that Captain Renault would renege on his deals was the fear of Annina Brandel, the young Bulgarian refugee who is in Casablanca with her husband Jan. Annina Brandel visits Rick in his café to ask about Captain Renault’s reliability. She explains why she and her husband left Bulgaria: “The devil has the people by the throat.” Staying under Nazi occupation is more desperate than deciding to leave. Rick is so cynical that he advises her to return home, but then he allows her husband to win in the casino so that they have the money for the exit visas, and she doesn’t have to give in to Renault’s demands.
It's hard for me to understand why Captain Renault’s treatment of women is often glossed over, but reviewers never even mention it. In fact, I saw the film on Blu-ray, which came with an audio commentary by Roger Ebert, the respected film critic. This is what he says about the lead characters, including Captain Renault: “. . . because there isn’t really a single lead character among all the leads. Certainly, the Nazis are bad, but among the main characters, even Claude Rains as the police chief is basically a good guy . . .”
What?
As I said, Claude Rains’s character Captain Renault doesn’t become a French patriot until the very end, when viewers realize that he has let Rick off the hook for the murder of Major Strasser. As if to emphasize his “transformation,” he drops a bottle of water from Vichy into a trash can and then kicks it in disgust. While Renault’s willingness to look the other way after Rick kills Strasser is laudable (one could make the case that the shooting was in self-defense, but no Nazi would have cared about that), I find his turnaround at the end of the film doesn’t quite make up for the evil he has been getting away with all along in Casablanca. Roger Ebert glosses over the suffering that Renault has inflicted on refugees. Protecting the true hero, Rick Blaine, and kicking the can at the end is only a start. Let’s see what Renault does when he and Rick finally leave Casablanca. (Sequel, anyone?)
Rick’s turnaround is much more believable. He says again and again that he never sticks his neck out for anyone, but he never actively hurts anyone either. He does the best he can under very difficult circumstances. There are other clues throughout Casablanca about his good intentions, even though he always denied having any good intentions at all. For example, he makes sure that his ex-girlfriend Yvonne is seen home safely in a cab and in the company of a café employee when she has had too much to drink. He keeps his employees on the payroll as long as he can after Renault shuts down the café on the orders of Major Strasser.
What finally convinced me to write about the noir features of Casablanca, its shadowy lighting, its wartime setting, its many desperate characters, was a piece I read online by Nellie Gilles for National Public Radio (NPR) in January 2023: “The Real-Life Refugees of Casablanca Make It So Much More Than a Love Story.” Gilles’s article for NPR is devoted specifically to the wartime setting and the refugee crisis that form the context of Casablanca. Gilles isn’t the only one, of course, to have noticed this feature of Casablanca: that so many of its actors escaped from Europe when the Nazis were intent on taking over. Both Rudy Behlmer and Roger Ebert provide audio commentaries on the Blu-ray release of the film. Behlmer states that many actors playing small and bit parts were refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. Ebert mentions that only four of the actors in Casablanca who receive screen credit for their roles were born in the United States.
You can read Nellie Gilles’s online article and listen to the NPR Radio Diaries segment by clicking here.
The film is based on an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Burnett, a New York City teacher, had visited Europe, and he based the play on what he and his wife learned during his visit. He saw the refugee crisis firsthand because he helped relatives leave Europe. The anti-Semitism that he saw in Vienna prompted him to write the play with his cowriter, Joan Alison. The main characters Rick and Ilsa in the film are Rick and Joan in the play, and they are more cynical in the play than they are in Casablanca. Luis Rinaldo (Louis Renault in the film) is much less charming and amusing and much more overtly lascivious in the play. The Bulgarian refugees just barely make it out of Casablanca, and they do so only with Rick’s help. Captain Heinrich Strasser (not a major in the play) is never under any threat or in any danger; in fact, he arrests Rick, who assumes that he won’t survive for long in Nazi custody as he is dragged off the stage. Even if you don’t want to see Casablanca as anything other than a love story, it still has darker, more noir roots in the original play.
I have not been able to find a published version of the play, but you can read Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, online in typescript form. Click here to read it at the Internet Archive. I found that the PDF download option provided a more legible way to read the copy.
The voice-over narrator in the opening sequence of Casablanca and his description of the refugees’ journey to Casablanca reminded me of a more recent film: Transit ((2018). The male protagonist in Transit, Georg, is wanted by the police in an authoritarian version of modern-day (2018) France. He makes his way to Marseille and successfully eludes capture, but in Marseille, he and other refugees must wait for the proper documentation to get out of the country permanently. Transit is based on the novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, which I was inspired to read after seeing the film. The novel, published in 1944, is representative of postwar literature published in France: bleak, existential, a series of events that barely form a plot. Both the novel and the film capture that feeling of desperation that I think forms the basis for Casablanca, too.
Click here to find my article about Transit (2018).
I have never heard anyone describe Casablanca as a film noir, but I think it has its share of noir elements behind Ilsa Lund and Rick Blaine’s love story: wartime desperation, existential angst, shadowy (chiaroscuro) lighting, ambiguity. Ilsa Lund suffers from the ambiguity of loving both leading men. She and Rick may share a grand cinematic love story, but I think she loves her husband Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid), too. Rick Blaine may protest otherwise, but he isn’t so very different from Victor Laszlo after all. The characters—and the film’s viewers and creators in 1942—had no idea how the war would end. That kind of ambiguity is hard to appreciate in 2023, but it is one of many of the film’s noir elements nonetheless.
There’s no doubt, however, that Casablanca is one of the most celebrated classic films. Its complexity is probably one of the reasons that is stands up so well to the test of time. Warner Bros. never thought it would be anything more than a B film, and yet here we are, celebrating the film eighty-one years later as part of the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Warner Bros. studio.
This article about Casablanca is my entry for the One Hundred Years of Warner Bros. Blogathon, hosted by Constance and Diana at their blog, Silver Scenes. Click here for a day-by-day list of links to the participating blogs. The list is updated each day of the blogathon, from December 15 to 17.
November 26, 1942 (Hollywood Theater), January 23, 1943 (United States), release dates • Directed by Michael Curtiz • Screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch • Based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett, Joan Alison • Music by Max Steiner • Edited by Owen Marks • Cinematography by Arthur Edeson
Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine • Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund • Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo • Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault • Conrad Veidt as Major Heinrich Strasser • Sydney Greenstreet as Signor Ferrari • Peter Lorre as Signor Ugarte • Curt Bois as the pickpocket • Leonid Kinskey as Sascha, the Russian bartender • Madeleine Lebeau as Yvonne, Rick’s soon-discarded girlfriend • Joy Page as Annina Brandel, the young Bulgarian refugee • John Qualen as Berger, Laszlo’s Resistance contact • S. Z. Sakall as Carl, the waiter • Dooley Wilson as Sam • Marcel Dalio as Emil the croupier • Helmut Dantine as Jan Brandel • Gregory Gaye as the German banker • Torben Meyer as the Dutch banker • Corinna Mura as the guitar player • Frank Puglia as a Moroccan merchant • Richard Ryen as Colonel Heinze, Strasser’s aide • Dan Seymour as Abdul the doorman • Gerald Oliver Smith as the Englishman whose wallet is stolen • Norma Varden as the Englishwoman whose husband has his wallet stolen • Lou Marcelle as the voice-over narrator
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures • Produced by Warner Bros. Pictures
