I have loved Casablanca from the first time I saw it on Turner Classic Movies. It was an afternoon showing. I was a teenager who knew the title, and being on the budding cinephile end of the spectrum I decided it was time to watch. Since that discovery, Casablanca has persisted in my life. It is one of my most rewatched movies, and I even paid the extra few dollars at registration with my first car to drive around with a “Play it Sam”-inspired license plate. I know I’m not alone in loving the Warner Bros. classic. The American Film Institute ranked it number three on the updated “100 Years…100 Movies” list in 2017. It pops up in movies across genres, from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation to La La Land. How is it that rampant affection persists for a movie celebrating its 80th anniversary this year?
Most would point to the doomed romance between Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). Their tale of love and loss, enacted by two of the most iconic movie stars Hollywood has ever produced, no doubt echoes through pop culture. Yet, rewatching Casablanca recently, I could not help but think that maybe the love story is a secondary feature, something that flourishes around an ardent thematic center. The more I revisit, the more I find that the film’s core is concerned far more with ideas of duty, resistance, and a rejection of isolationist individualism. As others have noted, it is a film born of the hope to drive American support of the Allied Forces during World War II. However, in our increasingly tumultuous present, where arguments about individual rights versus collective good and violence from authoritarian leaders abound, Casablanca’s lessons reverberate anew.
Dismantling American Isolationism
“I stick my neck out for nobody.” So says Rick early in Casablanca, a line that serves rather as a thesis for where his character starts the film. Rick’s backstory paints a man running from an ever-present impulse to serve a cause beyond himself. When he meets Ilsa’s husband and Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), Victor lays it out plainly. “My friends in the underground tell me that you have quite a record,” he begins. “You ran guns to Ethiopia. You fought against the fascists in Spain.” He goes on to ask Rick, “Isn’t it strange you’re always fighting on the side of the underdog?” Rick’s flippant response is simply, “Yes, I found that a very expensive hobby.” That response gets to the core of Rick’s self-assured resistance to support another “underdog” in Laszlo: his habit to commit himself to righteous causes consistently comes at personal cost.
Pairing this with Rick’s trumpeted identity as an American expatriate, his thematic purpose solidifies quickly. He runs “Rick’s Café Américain,” a topically capitalist business intent on serving drinks and entertainment to anyone, including Nazis. Yet, cracks in Rick’s detached façade surface early on. When a young refugee comes to him desperate for a way to make enough money to pay for her and her husband’s escape, Rick quietly has one of the men running a roulette table in the back of the café rig it so she wins. Elsewhere, he implicitly supports his employees’ commitment to the Resistance cause by giving his blessing for them to attend planning meetings. For all his pomp about risking his safety “for nobody,” he edges towards involvement at nearly every turn. He may primarily operate as an insulated capitalist focused on making money and staying above reproach during wartime, but that does not last.
His American identity is vital to this because the United States was committed to isolationist foreign policy in regard to World War II at the time of Casablanca’s production. World War I and the Great Depression collapsed the American viewpoint into one of self-preservation set on “non-involvement in European and Asian conflicts and non-entanglement in international politics.” Yet, much like Rick’s quiet support, the American government shifted from isolationism to “non-belligerency” where President Roosevelt signed off on arms shipments to countries fighting against the Axis powers. Where Casablanca and history overlap once again is the final push that motivated each to throw off the visage of non-involvement. For Rick, it is realizing his love for Ilsa must be secondary to quelling the threat of Nazi invasion, the impending doom that blots out petty personal issues. For Americans, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a final push to take up arms, a moment when the war came home.
While the specifics of Rick, Roosevelt, and World War II are admittedly distanced from our current day-to-day, the underlying thematics and commentary that Casablanca mounts are viscerally present. With the parallel realities of COVID-19 and a renewed focus on Black Lives Matter and similar pushes to rectify calcified systemic racism in American culture, Rick’s journey can serve as a template for what Americans should be doing. Instead of bickering about whether or not masks and vaccines impede purely personal rights, there should be a codified swell to throw off the binding of selfishness to secure the common good. COVID-19 is not an issue that can be ignored and hoped to go away. It is both a national and global crisis that requires personal sacrifice to secure safety for all. Just as Rick and real-life Americans gave up comfort to support the fight against Hitler, contemporary Americans must recognize the same needs to stave off further variants and unnecessary deaths.
Similarly, Americans choosing to pretend systemic racism does not exist exhibit a version of isolationism that commits the sin of considering only one’s own lived experience. If white Americans are confined to perpetuating systemic racism because of the fear that confronting it suggests they are complicit, that is an enactment of selfish isolationism that discounts the lived experience of BIPOC Americans. Furthermore, those actions embolden the subset of Americans who actively work to uphold racist ideologies through all manner of violent and state-sanctioned oppression. In essence, the lesson Casablanca can still teach today is that Americans with even the basest understanding of the stakes and issues at play must embrace the same transition Rick made from being pulled back to actively combating the threats which endanger our neighbors, friends, family, and fellow citizens. Rick recognized the need, and so must we.
Confronting Authoritarianism
The events unfolding in Ukraine as I write this essay throw Casablanca’s wartime considerations into stark relief. Admittedly, I conceived of this article before Russia began its invasion. Yet, the longer I watched news coverage the clearer it became that to consider Casablanca’s relevance without connecting to the immediate parallel of an authoritarian leader mounting an occupation would be irresponsible. While there are obvious distinctions between Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, the broad analogs of the two egomaniacal and violently-inclined leaders and their military actions are striking. Much like Hitler began his invasion by “annexing” German-speaking Czechoslovakia on grounds of Germany’s cultural claim, Putin pursued the same line of thinking with Crimea. Just as world leaders adopted appeasement approaches with the hope it would quell further action from Hitler, a similar angle on Putin has once again resulted in mounting aggression. Only time will tell what other parallels unfold.
Turning from context to content, it requires minimal transference to reckon with the ways that fleeing Ukrainians resemble the various refugees holed up in Casablanca. All are the human cost of violence enacted by frenzied leaders, those whose homes become untenable due to war arriving on their doorsteps. Of course, Ukraine is not unique in this regard, coming on the heels of similar exoduses from Syria and Afghanistan. Anti-immigrant and -refugee rhetoric flying across the internet and airwaves within the United States obscures the basic humanity of the individuals forced to flee. Casablanca stands as a piece of cinema forthright in its opposition to the dehumanization of refugees. Alongside the narrative focus on Laszlo’s need to escape and the patchwork of café patrons from all over the world looking to do the same, the production itself is composed of immigrants and refugees. Casablanca is therefore built on a foundation of empathy and shared trauma.
From that foundation, Casablanca makes efforts to foreground the defiant spirit that ripples through the refugee and revolutionary population that continue the fight even when faced by the arrival of Nazi officers. Casablanca itself is located in what was French Morocco, therefore considered an extension of Nazi-occupied France. While Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) and his Nazi compatriots are restricted in their ability to actively move to stop Laszlo from escaping, they represent the threat of fascist governance hellbent on silencing dissent. One of the most moving and memorable scenes in the film comes when Laszlo enters the café to find the Nazis singing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” a German anthem about a past military victory over France. Laszlo’s response is to strike up the band to play “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem written during the French Revolution to champion a spirit of resistance. The result is that every voice in the café not belonging to a Nazi joins in and silences the German show of force.
There would be similarity to spare if one were only to consider the way Ukrainians have taken up arms to defend their home and succeeded in disrupting Russia’s massive military force. But, in a moment of staggering likeness, a video emerged last week of Ukrainian MPs singing the national anthem in Kyiv as they voted to approve measures to seize Russian assets and property in Ukraine. No, the MPs were not in a smoky speakeasy singing over Nazi officers, but their recorded and released actions embody the spirit of unified defiance that Casablanca spearheads by composing its “La Marsellaise” scene. The fictional scene operates as a rallying cry to epitomize what happens when a multinational coalition of dissenters and freedom fighters join forces to drown out the sadism of violent oppressors. The Ukrainian people and singing MPs exhibit the real-life equivalent of what can be accomplished through obstinate unity.
What brings these issues back around to the United States is the recent history that led many conservative pundits and politicians to side with, or refuse to condemn, Putin’s actions. The same white supremacist and xenophobic ideologies that led to the aforementioned violence and continue to feed caustic policy have codified into a terrifying American embrace of neo-fascism. Instead of the America that Casablanca suggests, one where the major hurdle was to overcome isolationism to confront fascism, we live in one where the always present underbelly of American culture has burst forth to be a public adversary. In that regard, Americans must consider the actions of the singing refugees and revolutionaries in Casablanca and the contemporary Ukrainian parallels, not as a rallying cry to get involved only in international affairs, but to recognize that they are stark messages concerning what we must confront on our own shores. The struggle against authoritarianism and fascism is a global one, and Casablanca reminds us that as many voices as possible must join together in order to triumph.
Here’s looking at you, kid.
In his book We’ll Always Have Casablanca, Noah Isenberg writes that “the specter of war, and the big moral decisions that came with it, permeated everything from the source material of Casablanca to the very climate in which it emerged” (88). The observation is undeniable and considering Isenberg’s words in this essay’s context, I would suggest a slight variation for the present; the specter of war, and the big moral decision that come with it, permeate Casablanca and the very climate it is considered in. My point being that Casablanca, 80 years on, remains a beloved Hollywood film for any number of reasons. While many viewers may not consider it through the framework I have built in this piece, the film’s richness indisputably provides opportunities to reflect on our present circumstances through the long eye of history that films like Casablanca capture and convey.
My hope is that anyone who revisits or discovers Casablanca because of its major anniversary, or whatever other motivation might run through them, can recognize the vital lessons that Rick and everyone around him can teach us. Cinema is neither constructed nor received in a vacuum, and while one movie from 1942 will by no means change the current world, it is a bright point in the constellation of art that continues to serve as inspiration. I watch Laszlo and his compatriots singing “La Marseillaise” and I cannot help but ache to add my voice in whatever small or large way to the chorus of contemporaries striving to triumph that spirit in our present day. Every day is another chance to do that better, and I like to imagine that after he walked off into the fog, Rick kept striving for better day after better day. We should all join him.
