Please enjoy “Casablanca” if you have an opportunity to watch it. It’s enjoyable. But if you’re a bit of a serious film buff, as I am, you might be somewhat disappointed. If you are influenced by the hype, you will assume it’s great and come away thinking it is a classic, one of the greatest films of all time. If you look at it objectively, it’s an enjoyable but deeply flawed artifact of an earlier era in Hollywood.
It is not a great film. And that is not really a secret. My opinion is not really way “out there”. The makers of the film themselves never thought it would even be received as a good film, let alone a great one. They were as surprised as anyone when it became a modest hit. They were surprised it won an Oscar as best picture, an award that was probably largely influenced by the politics of the era (it came out in 1942). They were probably even more surprised when, as time went by, it came to be regarded as a “classic”.
The problems are obvious. Way too much glycerin tears. Mawkish scenes of melodrama. Improbable story developments. Bogart’s acting (he’s just playing himself, folks). The awful sets (the entire film was made on a backlot at Warner Brothers). The over-dressed major characters. The cliches.
There is a video on Youtube that nicely dramatizes the kind of mass hallucination that takes place when a film beloved by Hollywood types and heavily promoted as a “classic” must be reframed so that all of its major deficiencies now become assets. Thus Spielberg raves about the emotional depth of a mawkish, sentimental, over-wrought scene of melodrama. Thus William Friedkin raves about the dynamics of an editing process that is clearly rudimentary and perfunctory. Thus they rave about the fake studio sets which, instead of reducing exotic locations to static, frigid cut-outs, is actually cleverly intended to provide the film with some kind ethereal mythic quality. They rave about Ilsa’s fabulous (and ridiculously unrealistic) costumes.
Look– when they made this film, nobody was fooled by these elements. They didn’t choose the artificial studio sets because they preferred them. They chose them because they were too cheap to film on location (by “on location”, of course, we don’t mean in Casablanca itself, but in a real, similar city). The film would have been far better had they filmed in Paris, or a similar European city, and Casablanca, or a similar African city. Think of the scenes of the shops along the narrow streets, the vendors, the animals. Think of a real airport and real planes. Think of Paris. And they didn’t choose the costumes to add to the authenticity: they chose the costumes to sell you on Hollywood glamour.
In its favor, most of the extras were actual European refugees, and that shows. Those are genuine tears in the eyes of some of the extras in that scene where they drown out the Germans by singing Le Marseillaise. Great scene, right? It was lifted from Renoir’s “Grand Illusion”.
Ingrid Bergman really was an extraordinary beauty who could act. But they dressed her up in the latest high fashions and did her hair and makeup so she looked like a super-model at a fashion show and not very much like a refugee or member of the underground. The same, of course, applies to Paul Henreid who looked absurdly well-coiffed for an underground leader on the lam from the Nazis.
The romance is kid stuff. There was implied sex in the original script but Hollywood in 1942 lived by the Hayes Code and one thing it was very specific about is that no leading character would leave his or her spouse for a lover, and the lead characters, if unmarried, can never have sex. The Hayes Code told America that you are children and cannot be trusted to consider adult themes and complexities. Some would argue, of course, that this makes the film more “wholesome”. I can agree with that. If you really think “wholesome” is some kind of flattering artistic category, instead of more properly an attribute of Wonderbread.
I don’t mind if people enjoy the film. But it breaks my heart to know what most people who will watch “Casablanca” and adore it will never see “The Third Man” or “The Best Years of Our Lives” or “Day of Wrath” or “Gaslight” or “Late Spring” or “Diabolique” or “Children of Paradise” any of the other truly great films of that era.