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| Screenshot of Paul Henreid, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart from the trailer for the film Casablanca. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| This screenshot shows Humphrey Bogart holding a gun in the airport scene. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| This screenshot shows Ingrid Bergman in a flashback scene with Humphrey Bogart. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This afternoon I watched Casablanca for the umpteenth
time, but it was the first time for many years that I had seen it right through
from the beginning.
It was preceded by Ben Mankiewicz on TCM saying people
were divided between those who thought it the greatest movie ever made and
those who thought it the second greatest. Probably it was Woody Allen who
stimulated this exaggerated praise for the film.
Certainly I found from the beginning that from the moment
Ingrid Bergmann walked into Rick’s café in Casablanca just after the French had
collapsed, and it had become vulnerable to Nazi pressure, from that moment it
became powerfully moving. From her first words, her voice seemed laden with
nostalgia, regret and sadness. She spotted the piano-player, said to him, after
gazing at him intently, “Play it, Sam.”
Oh, shucks, says Sam I am a bit rusty, I have forgotten it
“Play it,” she repeats, and when he still demurs, she
says, more firmly, “Play it, Sam, I will hum it.” So she starts to hum it, and pretty soon Sam
has picked up the tune that will forever be identified with this movie, the
ruminatory As Time Goes By, and as
her eyes fill with tears, we are hooked. But I mean hooked.
Then Bogart, playing his well-known impersonation of a
real person, a real man, tells Sam, “Didn’t I tell you never to play
that!” And we know what it’s all about,
this movie, immediately, and that his
tough-as-steel act, his never showing his emotions to anyone, is all a show and
will never last, we know it from that moment, even after the pianist has warned
him to stay away from her, “She’s trouble, boss.”
Then she comes to his room. He knew she would, but he
begins to assail her with having stood him up, left him standing in the rain at
the railway station where they were supposed to go off together and he is still
aching inside because of it, but, of course, never showing it to anyone,
pretending it is all done and finished with.
I had forgotten that there is a fairly long flashback
sequence of them in Paris, magically in love although they met only two days before, and it is all
compounded because their love affair is being played out against the spectacle
of the German tanks rolling towards Paris. And there, in a café called La Belle Aurore, that looks exactly like
Rick’s Place, there is Sam singing the same song, their song. He said he knew nothing about about her. What was she doing ten years ago? She says, “I thought there
were to be no questions. I guess I was having the brace put on my teeth,”she
says, “what were you doing?”
“I was looking for a job.”
Back in Casablanca, she comes to his room again, to
apologize, and ask for his help, but he is harsh with her, tells her he can’t
be worked like that, just to get what she wants out of him, so she leaves
again, and, he being a man who has emotions only in private, he puts his head
on the table between his hands, something he hasn’t done in years.
Then comes the big sequence, a thrilling one, where the
customers of the cafe rise and sing La
Marseillaise to drown out the Nazi song being sung by a group of German
officers, an event that causes the café to be closed. The local chief, played
by Claude Rains, is amiable but crooked,
ready to do well out of everyone else’s misfortune, and he does the Germans’ bidding, and explains, when
asked why, “I am shocked, shocked, to find gambling going on here.” (I heard
that line quoted recently by someone commenting on the Rob Ford imbroglio,
which, he said reminded him of the movie line.
Of course the denouement is, strictly, unbelievable. But
we know, we have been allowed to pick it up that against everything he has said
and is saying, Ilse, his lost love has again touched Rick’s heart. So he
arranges for a young couple desperate to get to the United States from Bulgaria
to win some money on his (Rick’s) crap table, (Rick being this man with a heart of gold).
Again, Ilse comes to him, he agrees to get her husband out
of the country, if she will stay with him, Rick.
She is desperate to lose him, he says they will always have Paris, and
she says, “I said I would never leave you.”
“And,” says Bogie, “you never will,” finally letting his
emotion out, free to sit on his
shoulder. Later, when she realizes he
plans to save her husband and to let her go with him, and so it is arranged,
she says (the words sounding as if wrenched out of her), “I don’t have the
strength to leave you again….” What a
master actor she was, this woman, able to breathe such life into his fairly
banal dialogue.
So the husband gets on to the plane with his wife and they
disappear into the mist, Rick having shot and killed the Nazi chief who has
tried to stop the plane.
And so to the ending, light-hearted, insouciant, the man
back to his manly ways, as he says to Claude Rains, who has just told him they
will have to leave Casablanca together,“I think this could be the beginning of
a beautiful friendship…”
It is, no matter how many times you see it, a great movie. There
are not that many of them that can repeatedly tug at your heart like this, but
it is a wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon, believe me.
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