Casablanca Review (Archive)

0:00Film spotting is presented by Regal Unlimited. Regal Unlimited is the all you can watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Save on tickets. Save on snacks. Members get 10 % off all non-alcoholic concession items. Sign up now in the Regal app or at regmovies.com slash unlimited. It is another film spotting archive drop. And with Valentine's Day just upon us here, Josh, we thought, why not check out some of the most romantic films that we've talked about in the Film Spotting Archive? Fair number of good ones to talk about.

0:45But then producer Sam had a good idea, put a little twist on it. What about the ones that have all been best picture winners leading up to the Oscars? So we thought, okay, let's go back. Let's go back maybe to the most romantic of them all. Casablanca. Not a bad choice. Casablanca. This is from March, 2017. I missed out on this review, Adam. It was you, Michael Phillips, film prof, Catherine Fusco. So yeah. He got academic on you. Yeah. Just kind of making me, making me feel left out. Casablanca also in my mind though, because we are on this Friday show going to be nominating our candidates for the film spotting Pantheon for 2026.

1:32And Casablanca was in the mix for me. We'll see. We'll see if it made it. Listeners will find out when they listen to the show, if it was one of those that I put in the mix, but definitely deserves consideration for the Pantheon and obviously for this 2017 review as well. And not to make everyone's brain short circuit, but if it did make your list, Josh, they'd have to listen to find out whether or not it was a sacred cow title, because obviously it got a sacred cow discussion, or whether it was a wild card, because you didn't talk about it with me. And the whole point of this Pantheon project is that we talk about the movies together.

2:13So Casablanca is a really tricky one. I may have found a loophole. We'll have to wait until Friday to see. But for now, for now, from March 2017, here is that review of Casablanca. Well, you are asking about Rick and here he is. Mademoiselle, may I present? Hello, I will, sir. Hello, Rick. Oh, you've already met Rick, Mademoiselle. Well, then perhaps you also... This is Mr. Laszlo. How do you do? How do you do? Well, here's a great deal about Rick and Casablanca and about Victor Laszlo everywhere. So anticipating the show we're going to do right now, Adam, about Casablanca and whether or not it's still the movie that it used to be for a lot of people, maybe still is for an awful lot of people.

2:52Last week, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies gathered in Chicago for its annual conference. And that is one hell of a lot of movie geeks in one town at one time, let me tell you. Hundreds of scholars, academics, specialists of all kinds, they gather, they give talks on every imaginable subject. And I caught a couple of them last week. One of them was called Complex Figures in Classic Hollywood, and it featured a film and literature professor from the University of Nevada, Reno, named Catherine Fusco. Well, Fusco gives this great 20-minute talk on Shirley Temple's profoundly disturbing early movie career in what were known as baby burlesques, these sort of precursors to Bugsy Malone, right?

3:28And this creepy and very kind of like bizarre sexual undercurrents, sort of astonishing stuff. anybody with an interest in old Hollywood who can give you 20 new things in the space of 20 minutes to think about regarding Shirley Temple's subject I know nothing about, okay with me. So Adam and I are happy to have Catherine Fusco join us from Reno to talk about this question, this monument, this movie known as Casablanca. Catherine, thanks for being on. Sure, I'm really happy to be here. Hi, FilmSpotting. Hello. Thank you, Catherine. Okay, so Casablanca turned 75 this year, and it's either ageless or it's very much showing its age, depending on which pundit or film critic or cultural observer you're reading at the time.

4:08The Warner Brothers movie premiered in late 1942, but went into general release early 1943. And with the Allies invading North Africa, the movie felt like the morning news right up there on the screen. Humphrey Bogart, as the idealistic but cynical American hiding out in Morocco, goes from attractive isolationist, I stick my neck out for nobody, he says, twice in the first 20 minutes, to committed, patriotic man of action. His love for Ingrid Bergman, who's hooked up with the Resistance war hero played by Paul Onreid, is sacrificed for the greater good. This movie won the Oscar for Best Picture, and it is a lot of people's favorite Hollywood movie.

4:44Woody Allen wrote a play and later a movie called Play It Against Sam about a guy hopelessly measuring himself against Bogie's image. I mean, you look at Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless that's entirely devoted to Bogie. You got, you know, It's one of the most revered and satirized romantic dramas in cinema history. Several books have been written about Casablanca's place in the culture, and most recently that includes Noah Eisenberg's Will Always Have Casablanca. And yet, and yet, a lot of people think it's basically no longer ready for its close-up. In a recent Slate piece on the book and the film, Laura Miller notes that Sight & Sound magazine did a 2013 poll of the 50 greatest films of all time.

5:25Casablanca, directed by Michael Kertesch, did not make the cut. And she says this, What's changed about Casablanca is the most powerful and intangible element in any work of popular culture, its ability to make each audience member feel, this is about me, about who I am, but most of all, who I want to be. And she says this, too, America still underestimates the degree to which the Second World War cast a long shadow over the last half of the 20th century. That shadow has mostly subsided, and the radiant dreams that consoled us as we walked through, while still worth revisiting, now seem less captivating and necessary, unquote.

6:05Adam, Catherine, we'll start with you, Catherine. Will we always have Casablanca, or is it sort of getting lost in the mists of time, the same mist we see Bogart and Claude Rains strolling through in the last few seconds of the film itself? That's my question. Oh, man. We just have 20 seconds. We just have 20 seconds for you. Shoot. You know, I was watching the film again yesterday to prepare, and I actually got a little nervous about being on the podcast, so I thought, oh, well, maybe I should just watch every kind of great classic film. So I rewatched Citizen Kane the day before. And, you know, I was thinking about that, you know, Kane as great, Casablanca as beloved kind of thing.

6:46And for me, I feel like Casablanca is this sort of gateway drug, but it's such a wonderful gateway drug to kind of get people in. So, you know, I'm all about the gateway drug here, you know, whether it's not maybe as heady as Citizen Kane. It really just gives you that kind of gut punch. But I was also thinking about those sort of relevance now in the Laura Miller article. Right. She's talking about how young men identified with this kind of cynic and less so with the more sincere Rick that we get by the end. And I was just thinking, man, you know, we could use a little sincerity and self-sacrifice now.

7:32Right. We're sort of in this moment of, you know, the hot take where you you kind of take the position that nobody else is taking and you're cynical and you kind of have your kind of antihero perspective. And I feel like we're kind of moving past that a little bit now. I think I don't I don't know if it's a post-election moment or, you know, we're kind of worn out on Tony Soprano or what. But I don't know. It feels fresh to me still. Did you see this film at a young age, Catherine? You know, I saw it in college. And so I was thinking also about the sort of long shadow of World War II part of this retrospective essay.

8:12And I saw it the year before September 11th. So I, you know, I was a 90s teen and I grew up with a lot of the kind of flashy indie directors. Right. So that was my initial film education as a teenager. I was watching, you know, Kevin Smith and Tarantino. And, you know, that's what all of my really film educated friends were into. And then I had a friend in college who was into classical film and we watched this film together. And I just felt like, oh, man, there's this whole other world of film, you know, that's cool and affecting. Right. And I think that's that's, again, this I really appreciate the non cynical kind of nature of the film.

8:56Right. That I guess, you know, after watching. Right. I remember having the flu at some point in college and watching Natural Born Killers. Right. This is sort of the antithesis of this. And it just felt really. I would get I would get the flu from that movie that Oliver Stone movie. So, you know, it was it was kind of it blew our minds really to watch this movie and all of those famous lines that, you know, are in the culture. But as someone who grew up being able to rent videos, not having to rely on, you know, what was playing on TV, having access to these lines and sort of getting hit. Bam, bam, bam.

9:28Oh, that's from this film, too. That's from this film, too. That's from this film, too. I just sort of felt like something cracked open seeing this. So, yeah. What about you, Adam? How early on did you bump into it? Yeah, this is a perfect secret cow. And why are you wearing a fedora right now? You know, I like to come in character. OK. I saw this for the first time not until I was in college, when I was in film school. So it would have been actually the late 90s when I saw this movie for the first time. And this really is the ideal sort of scenario for one of these reviews because watching it again just last night, actually, I realized I don't think I had seen it in the interim at all.

10:05Somehow I had never had an opportunity to see it. So I really am revisiting a film that is regarded as a classic and that I saw originally many years ago and loved. and it felt almost like I was watching it for the first time. And that's what we're usually going for here. And it's funny, I picked out the exact same two paragraphs from the Laura Miller Slate article as you did, Michael, the one about movies and a movie like this making you think most of all of who you want to be. And then her concluding statement where she says, essentially, that that is no longer the case of this movie. It maybe no longer has that power.

10:41And she says, it's still worth revisiting, but less captivating and necessary. Watching it again last night for me, I found it still as captivating as I did 20 years ago. I found it even more necessary, actually. But we can get into that later. The other aspect of that, the first part, talking about every audience member feeling like this is about me or someone who I aspire to be, I made my kids watch this with me, my two oldest. So my son Holden just turned 15, and my daughter Sophie is about to be 13. Sophie was mostly kind of lost by all the maneuvering of the plot of the film. The political stuff.

11:17Yes, but my son Holden is this huge international diplomacy nerd. Those are the kind of games he plays, computer games and otherwise. Was he saying things like, oh, yes, the Casablanca Conference was right around that time. Yes, he was actually, Michael. And he's huge into geography, World War II in general. He's certainly not a connoisseur of classic cinema. He loved this movie. And I was sitting right next to him on the couch and I was listening to him audibly react to all these great moments and lines, lines that he, for the most part, was hearing for the first time. And at the end of it, he just said, everybody in that movie was so awesome.

11:51And I knew exactly what he meant because that comment Laura Miller had about a lot of adolescent boys maybe taking immediately to bogey and his gruffness and his toughness and how unflappable he seems at all times except when he's around Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa. you know, that's something I think my son probably does sort of wish he had a little bit more in him, just as I do, actually, for that matter. And at the same time, he's this selfish rogue. He's charming, of course, and he's funny and he's in control. And at his core, he's this idealist. And so I know that Holden was reacting to this figure that he admired in some way, but it wasn't just him.

12:28It was Claude Rains. It was Peter Lorre. It was Paul Onreid. It was Sydney Greenstreet. He was responding to the performances, of course. And a moment I'll single out that I know work for both of us is when we see Renaud's devilish little grin, when he sees the Germans starting to sing about the fatherland. It's just like these freaking guys, you know, and I just love that we get those those kind of reactions. We get so many moments like that, wonderful faces throughout this whole film. But he he really was invested in not just the plot, but just these characters and those lines of dialogue. And yes, he did discover that in one of his games, there's a badge or something that's called the Here's Looking at You Kid badge.

13:07Never understood it. Well, guess what? It's something you get when you go from like Portugal to Casablanca or vice versa. So that clicked for him and it felt relevant to him. That's for sure. But it felt even more relevant to me for some of the political reasons that you touched on, Catherine. I think we can get into that a little bit more. I think the thing that I think is a little nutty about the Laura Miller piece and Slate is this idea that it's not, you know, an admirable architect. There's nobody to kind of look up to and aspire to. And I think especially I can only speak as a high school age, you know, male in Racine, Wisconsin, probably seeing him for the first time when I was, I don't know, 14 or 15, probably on TV.

13:47And then I saw Early Date for Me, you know, took my high school girlfriend, Sheila Hogan, up to Milwaukee to see, you know, a revival screening. This is like in 78, 79. And I mean, think of that. That's 40. It's almost 40 years ago and the film was turning 75. So, you know, it means it just lived in the culture for me in a way that it does not for even people who adore it, who are, you know, 10, 20, 25 years younger than me. It's it's just not it's just not the same. I was wondering about that, though. I was looking this time at the moment we first see Bogart and we see first a cigarette and a cocktail and then we see his face.

14:27And, you know, I've been sort of struggling with that last moment of the essay we're talking about where she says that this is less captivating and necessary. And I was just thinking, well, you know, what about Don Draper? Weren't there all these little kind of wannabe Don Drapers running around because people are really into the fact there's the smoking and the cocktail culture and all this stuff? And, you know, it's there's still that kind of, I guess, hipness, but, you know, it's much less shallow in some ways. Right. This is a character. I don't know who who sort of has this history of goodness and the sacrifice that he gets into.

15:02So we get the kind of style and surface here, I think, that still does feel pretty, you know, he seems pretty cool to me. Yeah, yeah. I think there's a couple things that have been, you know, one of the best things in that Laura Miller essay, and I don't want to talk about that too much, but I think she rightly so really dings Woody Allen's play and movie played against him hard for including a line like, I never saw a dame that didn't understand a good slap in the mouth or a slug from a 45. That's what the imaginary bogey says in that play. You know, Bogart never would have said a goddamn thing like that.

15:36I mean, that's a Mickey's. You mean Rick? Yeah, Rick. You wouldn't say that. You're right. Anybody Bogart ever played, that line is Mickey Spillane or Mike Hammer. It has not got anything to do with Bogart or Casablanca. It just isn't. And one of the things, if anything, you can kind of look at Casablanca and say that the guy, you can argue that Rick is really mired in self-pity and heartbreak. And that's, but to me, that's what makes this kind of glorious Hollywood schlock a little bit human. I mean, this is not, this is, I don't want to, I mean, it's a film I really love. At the same time, I understand completely why the sight and sound poll wouldn't make room for it in its top 50.

16:19I don't think I would either. It's just not the kind of classic that you look to for form, even though it's, for what it is, it's extremely adroitly made. Yes. And gorgeously cast. And, you know, there's a reason people go back to it. And a lot of it is the writing, which they were, my God, they were, the story of how this thing barely got made. You know, rewriting every night and every morning and not even knowing who is going to end up with who by the end of it. And, you know, it gives the movie kind of a peculiar tension. And I think you can feel it. It's kind of a meta thing going on where, you know, all these characters in Casablanca don't know if they're getting out in the narrative.

16:58And yet, and at the same time, the Epstein brothers and all the other folks working on the movie, you know, they didn't really know where they were going with this adaptation of an unproduced play. They just didn't know. But it's a movie that, it's a kind of classic, quote classic. You can show people that it's not an intimidating kind of, you know, it's more about comforting content and rather than challenging form. And therefore, I think it's kind of the opposite of something like Citizen Kane, which is not trying to make you cry. It's not trying to move you in a conventional way. You might find Kane fascinating and moving and all kinds of things, but it's not.

17:38I mean, they are completely different temperatures, these two films. Yeah, Curtiz is definitely not trying to show his hand at work. And that said, Catherine, you mentioned the intro, our introduction to Bogey here. And Michael, you talk about maybe this isn't a movie that is drawing a lot of attention to its form, but the craft of it in terms of how the screenplay and the visuals work together. I think this movie has one of the all-time great setups and introductions to a character because not only do we only see those parts of him first, but even before that happens we see his name when the plane is flying in one of the first shots yeah one of the first shots we see his name and so immediately we're kind of wondering who is rick and why is he being featured so prominently that early on and then at least three or four times people talk about rick before we even meet him and there's all this talk about about what once we do finally meet him there's all this talk about what would impress him right ugarty talks about that.

18:35He doesn't have a drink with anyone. Yeah. So by the time we do meet him, we can't wait to finally see what this guy's all about. It's really heightened in that way. And then, as I said, when we do finally get to see him, he's someone who we know everyone else is in some way looking up to or trying to impress. And that makes us then revere him a little bit more, even as a character. I think another thing that stood out to me this time that I really liked is the way the Paul Onry character is in a lot of ways equal to Bogie. And I can speak for my son and say that he felt that way. Like, I mean, Bogie is still Bogie.

19:10Don't get me wrong, right? And he's the star of the film. I'm sure everyone reveres him more. But he could have been played. Onry could have been played as this sort of bland, I'm going to probably get myself into trouble saying this around two historians such as yourselves, but a Ray Milland type character who maybe is kind of just the straight guy and he's meant to be the foil to the cool guy. I think you're thinking more like Ralph Bellamy. Ralph Bellamy, that's who I am thinking of. Exactly. Or Bob Cummings. Maybe so. But here we have a guy who is someone who actually impresses Rick, right?

19:43He impresses Rick. You see that every time they interact with each other. Yeah, you hear he's escaped from the concentration camp. Right, he's truly brave. He truly acts on his convictions. He's also good-looking and smart and eloquent. And so what that does is that heightens that tension where we are legitimately torn, I think, as viewers in our allegiances. As much as we revere Bogie, it isn't just about who she's going to choose. It's about the conflict of knowing she could be great with both. And yeah, probably better off, as Bogie ultimately decides, with Victor. But I do feel like we're torn probably because we see him as an equal to Rick in some ways.

20:20And the movie could have chosen another route. You must know it's very important I get her off Casablanca. It's my privilege to be one of the leaders of a great movement. You know what I've been doing. You know what it means to the work, to the lives of thousands and thousands of people. That I'll be free to reach America and continue my work. I'm not interested in politics. The problems of the world are not in my department. I'm a saloon keeper. My friends in the underground tell me that you've quite a record. You ran guns to Ethiopia. You fought against the fascists in Spain. What of it? Isn't it strange that you always happen to be fighting on the side of the underdog?

20:54Yes, and I found that a very expensive hobby, too, but then I never was much of a businessman. I think I disagree with you a little bit. This time through, I was feeling that the love triangle was really kind of weighted in one point a little bit this time. I wonder, you know, a lot of, as you were saying, of what we learn about people comes through dialogue that other people are speaking, and I was wondering, you know, I think so much of the respect that we feel for the Laszlo character comes through what other people say about him. I mean, for the longest time, I couldn't figure out, you know, what does this guy feel about his wife?

21:27No, that's valid. So, yeah. So this time I felt that, I think, a little more strongly that the, you know, the weight of Rick versus Laszlo. There is another one other quick screenwriting thing I really like here that I picked up on this time is we know why Ilsa left him at the train station. We figure it out because the screenplay gives us hints along the way before Rick figures it out. And I like that when the movie lets the audience sort of figure out something and then we're waiting for him to finally catch up to things a little bit. And it allows us also to see him as fallible. Like he's missing part of the story and he's wallowing in his self-pity.

22:05And that tempers the coolness of his character. Yeah, without that, I think you got a very boring character. And Paul Henry hated making this movie. He thought the Laszlo character was nothing but functionary and nothing much to play. But I think what I really noticed this time through, and I hadn't seen the movie front to back in many years, but I saw it the other day. And I really do think the first 40, 45 minutes is kind of terrific Hollywood studio filmmaking. It's really crisp. I mean, Michael Cortese has always been sort of a compelling A-minus director for me. You know, and I just sort of enjoyed things like, and this sounds totally wonky and like off narrative, but nobody could film a car doing, pulling up at high speeds as the camera dollies in on a diagonal.

22:59Curtiz is always moving the camera in a dolly on a diagonal in a way that totally is dynamic. And, you know, I love it when he's like zipping into a nightclub or just sort of dealing with backlot scenes of this sort of airsets Casablanca. I mean, it's a lot closer to Van Nuys or Thousand Oaks than Casablanca, the whole kind of atmosphere of the picture. But it's sort of irresistible anyway. Van Nuys just doesn't have the ring to it, though. No, it doesn't. No, I wouldn't have called it Van Nuys. But there's a close-up on Bergman when she finally gets... Which one? There's so many great ones. It's fine.

23:37When she finally gets Sam, the piano player played by Dooley Wilson, to play and sing as time goes by, right? The Herman Hupfeld song from 1931, which enjoyed this amazing resurgence after the film came out 12 years later. And it's a 26 second close up with just the piano. And that there's so many great things about that. 26 seconds, A, Max Steiner's score, the musical score, finally has to shut the hell up and just let the piano do it. Steiner's, you know, I love some of his stuff, but not a lot. And I think he's kind of always bigfooting the action. That's an amazing 26 seconds. To me, that felt like, okay, I'm in, and I'm not in, like, watching it in sort of a interested observer way.

24:21I just thought that feels completely fresh. A lot of it's just her beauty, I suppose. But a lot of it's just everything else that's conspiring to make that moment great. And then there's kind of a bookend shot where Bogart is drunk, and he's drunkenly saying, you play it for her, you can play it for me, play it. And that shot is kind of a medium shot, and that's almost a full minute. It's 57 seconds. And then that sort of fades into the, you know, what a lot of people think is kind of one of the weaker five minutes of the picture, which is the Paris flashback, right? But that minute of a single shot where Bogart is sort of muttering a couple things incomprehensibly, that again is like, now this is screen acting, you know?

25:00It is. And that's where you realize there are feelings at stake. And I think even in this sort of Hollywood fairy tale, and I don't want to diminish the film and I don't want to inflate it. I just sort of feel like if people don't know Casablanca, they just kind of need to find out for themselves where they land in it. And I, you know, if you happen to land on a situation, in a position where you feel yourself, eh, I don't really get the fuss. well welcome to my experience with it's a wonderful life every year i mean you know and uh but casablanca is not that for me i i found myself kind of newly falling into it happily especially the first half i think there is something a little progressively weaker about the film although i adore the way it ends um and maybe it's just because some of the desperation with the screenwriting as they were writing on the fly maybe there's just one too many scenes where somebody pulls a gun and it's supposed to be a surprise and then there's a reversal and blah blah but the first 45 minutes to me is like is absolutely irresistible popcorn yeah the last 30 minutes or so michael i think i'm with you a little bit that you certainly become aware or i did that there's a real lack of stakes the nazis are never a threat in this movie not even remotely and i think maybe that's something that that hawks when he did his version of this and to have and have not he improved on that one thing which is actually making the nazis a little bit scary well and menacing right and even though So Warners and Hal Wasler were very forward, progressive thinkers in terms of the Hollywood power structure about let's deal with what's actually happening in the war today.

26:34Other people, it took them much longer to kind of embrace, you know, the sort of the anti-Nazi propaganda movement. And this is, you know, yes, this film in a way defines anti-Nazi propaganda films. But it does it in a way that, thank God, transcends sort of the weaker stuff. I mean, just a year before, Bogart did a film with John Huston, arguably a greater director, I think inarguably greater director at his best than Kurtishe, but called Across the Pacific, right? And that's a film that's pretty interesting and pretty fun. And then there's all this kind of cheap, really kind of egregious anti-Japanese stereotyping, which, of course, was just rampant all through Hollywood for three, four years.