Does Casablanca Still Have It? Two Critics Clash Over Timeless Classics

can an accidental piece of wartime propaganda shot on back lots with an unfinished script still be the greatest love story cinema ever produced that is the central question of casablanca and after our clash last week over whether sergeant pepper was studio perfection or dated self indulgence we find ourselves back on the cultural frontlines we do because i am looking at michael curtiz's 1942 masterpiece from the ground level and here is what i can actually see a film that survives because it is ruthlessly unsentimental about the price of doing the right thing unsentimental nadia it is the most shamelessly romantic film hollywood ever manufactured every line is an epigram every shadow is bathed in studio gloss

and the piano player just happens to strike up the exact melody of their heartbreak on cue it is undeniably magnificent melodrama but it belongs to an era that believed grand gestures could solve geopolitical catastrophes but that is the myth of the film oliver not the reality on the screen look at rick blaine in that cafe humphrey bogart does not play a dashing savior he plays a cynical exhausted exile running a gin joint charging double for water bribing corrupt police officials and refusing to stick his neck out for anyone and yet within two hours that very same cynic gives up the woman he loves murders a nazi major on an airstrip and walks into the fog to join the free french it is an extraordinary piece of narrative engineering of course but let us be honest rick's sudden moral awakening is wartime recruitment wrapped in silk it asked nineteen forty two audiences to abandon isolationism once you take away that immediate historical panic what remains is an impossible fantasy of noble renunciation i hear you but

the renunciation is the entire point you call it a recruitment film i call it a documentary about refugees because half the extras in rick's cafe were actual european exiles fleeing fascism when they sing la marseillaise to drown out the german officers madeleine lobo was crying real tears on camera that part is confirmed that was not hollywood polish that was lived terror bleeding straight through the emulsion alright i will give you that one that scene possesses an undeniable spine chilling authenticity but consider this casablanca succeeds almost in spite of itself the epstein brothers and howard koch were rewriting pages on the morning of shooting ingrid bergmann famously confessed she did not even know which man ilso

was supposed to end up with until the final week how can a work hold up as immaculate art when its creators were essentially improvising the moral architecture in the dark because real life is improvised in the dark that chaos is why the dialogue has teeth if they had planned it out like a clockwork puzzle we would have gotten another wooden pious morale booster instead we got ilsa walking into that bar torn between absolute personal desire and crushing historical responsibility she is not a prize to be won she is paralyzed paralyzed yes but ultimately stripped of agency in the climax rick decides her fate for her he tells her she has to get on that plane

with victor laszlo because the problems of three little people do not amount to a hill of beans a modern viewer watches that and asks why does rick get to make that choice why is her devotion divided by male decree because neither of them had a choice that airstrip is not about male control it is about the cold fact that private happiness cannot survive in a burning world if she stays the gestapo catches them both that is confirmed by the plot not claimed and yet that is not the whole picture the real friction between us is not whether the film is entertaining it remains breathtakingly witty the real question is whether modern audiences still believe that private sacrifice for a public ideal is heroic or merely tragic delusion we live in an age that prizes self actualization above all casablanca demands that you bury your own heart to keep a printing press running for the resistance that is the exact nerve it touches in an unstable world do you retreat into cynical self preservation or do

you accept that some things matter more than your own comfort casablanca does not give you an easy answer it leaves two shattered men walking into the darkness having lost everything except their purpose that is the picture from here back to you in the studio