Back when I opted to go with Stacker’s 100 greatest films list, I noticed something: Dr. Strangelove‘s entry appeared twice. It was even numbered the same. It sat in the place where the #3 entry should have gone, and I had no real idea what the real #3 entry was. But the image at the top of the article showed Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, a film that wasn’t listed anywhere on the Stacker list. I did see Casablanca listed as #3 when I did a Google search, but not on the webpage itself. That was, well, really weird.
Then again, Casablanca‘s being the classic that it is is a really unlikely thing as it is.
Consider, if you will, the directors on Stacker’s top ten selections: Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Michael Curtiz, Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Akira Kurosawa, Charlie Chaplin, Quentin Tarantino, and Orson Welles. Most of those names are fairly recognizable, even to people who aren’t big film buffs. Some of them are recognized as among the best to ever shout “Cut!” at the end of a scene. But then there’s Michael Curtiz, director of Casablanca, and while his filmography isn’t exactly full of the forgotten and the forgettable, I don’t think many people necessarily recognize Curtiz’s name. Seriously, Curtiz directed Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee Doodle Dandy, White Christmas, Mildred Pierce, and, of course, Casablanca. Heck, I think when my podcast was still a thing, my partner Jen and I were discussing Yankee Doodle Dandy when I brought up how it shared a director with Casablanca, something Jen didn’t know until I told her as I recall, and something I didn’t realize until I thought to look up the director’s filmography.
That was my first episode. I didn’t have this blog when I made it.
OK, so, maybe Curtiz should be better-known. But let’s set that aside for now: Casablanca is a whole lot of other things that make it something of an accidental classic. Humphrey Bogart is the lead, and while I don’t know for sure, he was certainly an unconventional choice for a romantic lead at the time as he hadn’t played one before. He was originally in a lot of gangster roles as a supporting actor, finally getting leads with film noir. But romance? He’s not a conventionally handsome man. Ingrid Bergman is absolutely lovely, but Bogart is, to put it bluntly, at best a fairly average-looking guy. He was also, it turned out, shorter than Bergman, so camera tricks were pulled to hide that fact.
The script, meanwhile, was based on an unproduced play, making it an untested story. A studio executive even called it “sophisticated hokum,” but not in a bad way according to Wikipedia.
It is, also, to put it bluntly again, war propaganda. While the film is set in December of 1941, it was made in 1942, the same year America entered World War II. As I noted in my first write-up of Casablanca, there was no way anyone making this film had any idea at the time how the war was going to turn out, and the same would apply for the audience that got to see it in the fall of the same year. Most of the cast was actually made up of actors who were themselves refugees from various European countries that the Germans had invaded, and that probably helped with a number of the performances. But the message here is clear: the Germans are bad, America is a shining beacon of hope, and the democracies of the world are under siege by fascism. The big character arc for the film is Bogart’s Rick, the American lead character, has to learn to care again and do what he can to help win the war. And heck, so does the blatantly corrupt local cop Louis (Claude Rains), but my reading suggests both men didn’t have to go too far to join the fight. Rick did care very much at one time before his heart was broken, and Louis does know where a French Resistance cell is that the two can join as they walk off together to begin a beautiful friendship.
And yet, despite it all, this film is an absolute classic of the genre.
Bogart, of course, was a great romantic lead. He just had to be given a chance to show it. The script is damn near perfect, with so many memorable lines that even people who haven’t seen Casablanca probably know a bunch of them just from watching Bugs Bunny cartoons or anyone doing a bad Bogie impression. I took particular note to Rick’s flashback to his romance with Bergman’s Ilsa, one that opens with the two riding in a car where the background behind them changes to show how far they actually drove. The conversation between Rick and Ilsa where they plan to flee Paris shows she has secrets he only knows about in hindsight, moments that probably stung Rick harder as he remembered things from the vantage point of his cafe, long after the fact. It works as well as it does thanks to a very smart script.
Besides, since so many romantic films these days show a third act break-up or a moment when the leading lady leaves a dull guy for a more exciting man, it is kinda nice seeing one of the best films of the genre features the exact opposite of that.
And as for the propaganda angle, the whole point of Casablanca is Rick Blaine has to learn to care again. It’s a gradual process as he repeats so many times how he won’t stick his neck out for anyone even as the film progresses and makes that idea seem less and less likely as Rick does more and more. How is that different from asking ordinary Americans to ration things for the war effort or collect scrap iron, or for young men to join the military while women went to work in munitions factories? There’s a reason Tom Brokaw called them “the Greatest Generation.” And while the story isn’t above calling America a land of hope and freedom, the big patriotic moment, one that even made me tear up a little, is when Rick has his band play “La Marseillaise” so his exiled patrons, all of them looking defiant or heartbroken or both, can drown out the Germans singing their own patriotic song, and that’s not even my country’s national anthem. Heck, there’s a bar or two of that song played over the end of the film in case you missed it the first time.
All of which is to say that Casablanca somehow put all the elements together to produce a timeless classic and a film that is about as close to perfect as you can get. Why Casablanca has stuck around as well as it has is anyone’s guess, really. It’s like asking why any piece of art in any form has staying power when other works in the same form are forgotten. It more or less just does. We’re all just better off because of it.
NEXT: I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised when I did the AFI Countdown that Casablanca was on the list. I was surprised at some of the films that were omitted from the list I did even if the later revision put some of them on it. I am referring to Stacker’s #2, 1957’s 12 Angry Men.
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