This little article is addressed to people who are familiar with the great 1941 film, Casablanca. I’m not going to bother with “spoiler alerts,” or explain the story leading up to its famous climax. It’s a movie that’s almost invariably ranked among the greatest films of all time. And I’d like to think that I live in a culture where — just as one might talk about “the gravediggers scene” in Hamlet, without having to explain who Hamlet and his friend Horatio are — one can talk about Casablanca as part of our “shared culture,” as I like to see it. (And I expect will remain so — despite the film’s being 80 years old — “as time goes by.”)
I do love the film, enough to watch it again after enough time has gone by since the last time that it will feel fresh.
(It is one of just a few films I’ve sometimes called “perfect” — along with the first Godfather movie, and Ground Hog Day, and in its own way, You’ve Got Mail.)
Love it though I do, the ending bothers me. I think I know why they ended it that way. It does a “job” for the thrust of the movie. But the “rightness” of the ending is just in terms of fulfilling the film’s arc. But the ending seems to me wrong for the “people” whose lives we’ve come to care about.
At the end, our protagonist — Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart — makes a big speech to the love of his life (played by Ingrid Bergman), who has passionate love for him, about how their personal concerns “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” and that her place is by the side of the other man — her husband Lazlo — because his role in the resistance to the Nazis is so important.
It’s a fine idealistic speech. (Though it is also an example of something I’m really tired of in the movies of that era, namely the man telling the woman how it’s got to be).
And I believe I understand why the movie gives us that speech about the need to sacrifice one’s own concerns for the good of the overall drama of the fight against Nazi evil.
Besides the spirit of the times in 1941, when the patriotic drum was already being beaten in Hollywood against the Nazis, emotionally involved in the war already raging in Europe, and as America was but months away from joining in after Pearl Harbor, there’s the biggest piece (I believe) having to do with our main character: the movie wants to show us that the events of the movie have resurrected Rick-as-Idealist from the terrible cynic that, earlier in the film, he kept declaring himself to be.
Where, earlier in the film, Rick made sure everybody knew he steered clear of the concerns of the wider world and took care of his own interests, this ending presents a man choosing to sacrifice himself for the kind of noble cause he’d dismissed so contemptuously before.
OK. I love redemption as much as the next guy.
Except I don’t buy this particular sacrifice. He presents it as wisdom. I think it’s a mistake. There are two people who are passionately in love, and there’s another two-some that’s held together by love, but on her side more by deep admiration than the kind of romantic passion that is at the heart of the lovers’ relationship.
I just don’t buy that what’s right is that our two lovers split.
The idea that Lazlo needs her to be able to fulfill his great mission just doesn’t wash. We already know enough of his history to know that — even alone, even in a concentration camp — he has maintained his purpose, his focus, his courage. Yes, he’d be sorry to lose the woman whom he does love. But we can tell he could handle whatever he needed to handle, including losing her to the man to whom she is connected with romantic passion. He’d be sad, but the anti-Nazi “movement” would still have just as fine a leader.
And what of the costs if things go the way Bogie chooses? “We’ll always have Paris” seems a pretty disappointing measure of romantic fulfillment — taken perhaps over a life-time -- for the two characters who have touched each other’s hearts, and our hearts.
I am big on World War II movies where the Nazis get defeated. But I also want the lovers we care about to get their heart’s desire, because I’m big on Romance in movies, too.
I’d prefer a way of ending Casablanca that did not make us choose between the two. That the movie sacrifices wisdom for the characters to make the shape of the movie work is this perfect movie’s one imperfection.