1942 • PG • 1h 42mins • Watch trailer • Stream on Max • Rent it
💎 Streaming Gems: You’re paying for Max but what’s good on here?
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie. You walk into your pizza joint and the air smells like toasted crusts. You pick up your pie and ask the guy at the counter, “Hey, what should I rent from Family Video next door to go with this?” Tonight, he says, “Try Bogart’s picture about being stuck at the party at the end of the world.” Sounds like it’s time we visited Casablanca.
Here’s the plot. It’s December of 1941 in—you’re not gonna believe this—Casablanca. That’s in Morocco, which is in upper Africa. Like, the top part. Like, if Africa wore a hat for a lot of the day and then took it off and had hat hair which stuck up in the back, the part that stuck up is Morocco. Anyway, we’re in den of sin Rick's Café Américain, which is really skating by on the implied class of all those diacritics. Rick himself (Humphrey Bogart) prowls around, keeping things running smoothly while delivering commentary like a late night host. Tonight, he bumps into hustler Ugarte (Peter Lorre), who tells Rick he’s got two coveted letters of transit. They’re golden tickets to get out of Casablanca, something that’s awfully hard to do. Ugarte hands ‘em to Rick for safe keeping just in time to get himself killed by police.
That’s when Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and beau Victor (Paul Henreid), who were supposed to buy the letters of transit from Ugarte, waltz in. Ilsa and Rick clearly have history, probably chemistry, and possibly economics together. She used to be with Rick, the bad boy who wanted to settle down with her, but now she’s with Victor, the good guy who’s not as exciting but was in Nazi concentration camps. A girl would look pretty bad leaving a guy like that. And Nazis are in town too, looking for Victor. Somewhere in the middle of all this stands crooked cop Louie, Casablanca’s chief of police. He’ll take a bribe and a free drink from anyone.
Can Ilsa and Victor skip town before the Nazis catch up with them? We’ll see. And does Rick still have a chance with Ilsa? Maybe. And how much of this movie is people arguing over playing a song? A lot, pal. A lot.
Noted Notables
How did the memorable faces of Casablanca get here?
⭐️ Humphrey Bogart
Worked his way up in Hollywood playing gangsters before his breakout role in High Sierra (’41) and famous-making follow-up The Maltese Falcon (’41), maybe the best noir flick of all time.
⭐️ Ingrid Bergman
Swedish-born, just a Grammy short of an EGOT. She spoke (and acted in) five different languages—Swedish, German, French, Italian, and English. She won three Oscars for leading roles, one of only four women to do so.
⭐️ Sydney Greenstreet
Managed a brewery but took acting lessons because he was super bored. Made The Maltese Falcon right before this with Bogart.
⭐️ Dooley Wilson
A band leader, singer, dummer, Broadway player and actor who was 56 when he crooned “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca. It’s an incredible performance that delivers a bittersweetness and legitimacy the movie wouldn’t work without. We buy that Rick’s is a real club because this guy is the real deal.
⭐️ Peter Lorre
Though he’s barely in this, you’ll know him from Fritz Lang’s M (’31) or Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace (’44). He’s the only person in this movie with a face more unusual than Bogie’s. Those eyes!
The Stew of ’42
Sounds weird now, but no one expected Casablanca to be a hit. Warner Bros. expected it to get on base but wasn’t holding their corporate breath for a home run. How come? I’m guessing the subject matter. This wasn’t a Gone with the Wind pedigreed epic. Nope, it was a pulpy tale of current events.
Here’s what was happening when they made Casablanca. Let’s start with the play. Did you know it was a play? It was a play!
It’s ’38 and there’s a lil’ something in the works you might of heard of called World War II. As with most sequels, people like it even less than the original. Playwright Murray Burnett is on a wife guy European vacation when he discovers two ingredients for a story. The Burnetts stop over in Vienna right after Germany gobbled up Austria. The mood in Vienna is bleak, and by “bleak” I mean “antisemitic”. Murray’s surprised but tells himself, “That’s going in my next play.”
On their next leg, the Burnetts route though Southern France. There they find a nightclub packed with folks from all over Europe, many of whom couldn’t return home again. There they met the human mold from which the character Rick would be cast. What I’m saying is they lived out season two of The White Lotus.
Then the year was 1941. Story editor Irene Diamond visited the Big Apple and uncovered Burnett’s script, then titled “Everyone Comes to Rick’s”. She passed it on to Warner Bros story analyst Stephen Karnot, who dug its high-brow low-genre ingredients, and passed it up to his bosses. In ’42 Warner Bros bought it for $20,000, which was a whole lotta clams at the time. About a cool half million bucks today.
Famous Lines You Didn’t Know Were from Casablanca
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Rick mad/glad Ilsa’s in his bar.
“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.” Rick toasting Ilsa.
“We’ll always have Paris.” Rick prying himself and Ilsa apart in the third act.
“Play it again, Sam.” Actually no one in the movie says this line, but it’s what your brain fills in when Ilsa says “Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake.”
“Round up the usual suspects.” Louie to his cop henchmen coining a phrase that would become the title for The Usual Suspects (‘95) fifty years later.
“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Rick to Louie as the two walk off toward their own bromantic getaway at the end.
Rick’s Cafe
“Okay, so Rick’s was a joint in France,” you say. Right! But also wrong. “But you said…” you say. Hey pal, I know what I said. But that was the stage play’s version of Rick’s. Casablanca’s Rick’s came from somewhere else. According to Paul Fairclough writing for The Guardian, the cinematic Rick’s traces it lineage to Cinema Vox in Tangier, roughly 200 miles northeast of Casablanca. Being at the tippy top of Morocco, Tangier had a complicated relationship with Europe. Only a few wet miles of the Strait of Gibraltar separated this northernly tip of Morocco from Spain, which had its own dictator infestation in the forties.
Tangier was weird. It lay in the middle of a Morocco Oreo. You got your Spanish Morocco on this side, and your French Morocco on that side, and your International Zone of Morocco cream filling in the center. Tangier was smack in the middle of the neutral area, with Cinema Vox in the middle of Tangier. Naturally, Cinema Vox was the Mos Eisley Cantina of its day. A lot of desperate and opportunity-seizing characters made up its population.
In ’40, Spain’s Franco got permission from the Nazis to grab all of Morocco. Suddenly, Tangier in general and Cinema Vox in particular weren’t the Switerzland Craigslist they were used to being. It wasn’t clear who was in charge, but a whole lotta folks wanted to be.
That’s where the Rick’s of Casablanca comes from. Its shifting alliances, palpable desperation and zigzagging line between altruism and opportunity are the third lead of the movie. Anybody can be anybody at Rick’s, including Rick himself. Bogart’s character doesn’t pick a side until he leaves. He’s putting holes in Nazis in an airplane hangar, not in his own joint.
At the Box Office
Look, Warner Bros knew what kinda movie it was making. Casablanca was a genre picture, not Oscar bait. When it hit theaters in November of ’42, it did fine. Audiences went to see it when it went wide in January of ’43 to the tune of $3.7M against a budget of around $1M. Pretty good return. Audiences connected with the refugee story they’d just begun to hear about in the news. Many of the extras in the film itself were immigrants and refugees. Helped sell the realism for performers on set, translating later to cinema veritas for theater-goers.
Critics quickly parsed what was so good about Casablanca. Variety praised “the combination of fine performances, engrossing story and neat direction” plus going “heavy on the love theme”. If that sounds like a something-for-everyone hit that capitalized on the WWII milieu, it was.
The movie went on to win three Oscars for the ’43 year—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay. It was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for preservation. It made Bogart and Bergman, who were already famous, immortal. And today we know it as one of the best films of all time.
Though in the contemporary sense it wasn’t a perfect movie, in the cinematic sense Casablanca was perfect at being a movie. It balances a character-driven plot, German Expressionism visuals and ratatat dialogue against a slew of what are frankly stereotypes. But as Umberto Eco wrote, “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us.” Casablanca brings it all together into a tidy, enjoyable package that’ll still move you eight decades later.
Pizza of the Week
Candied Pineapple and Canadian Bacon with Chives
It’s winter. Pineapple isn’t in season until spring. But sometimes it’s Hawaiian pizza time. In a pinch, grab canned pineapple from the grocery store, making sure it’s in juice, not syrup. Pop the top and dump the contents—juice and all—into a saucepan over medium heat. Add a big pinch of brown sugar and a splash of red wine vinegar. Let it simmer, stirring occasionally, until the pineapple darkens and the juice has thickened into a barely-there sticky syrup. Shazam! You’ve turned watery canned pineapple into caramelized flavor nuggets fit for any time of year.
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this one. I loved dipping back into black-and-white movies, which got me into movies in the first place. Though Casablanca is on Max, it’s almost certainly at your local public library too. Watch it for free!
A programming note: This year I’m publishing these write-ups every other week. That schedule gives me the margin to sit with them longer and enjoy writing them more.
PS: If you dug this, share it with a friend who would too! It really helps me out. Give ‘em a letter of transit to Casablanca.
Notes:
La La Land (2016) lifts a lot from Casablanca.
A mob of fans shouted “Here’s looking at you, kid” to Bogart as he entered Grauman’s Chinese Theater on March 2, 1944 for the 17th Annual Academy Awards. He was embarrassed, but happy. Source
If you’re watching Casablanca for not-the-first time, play a little game with yourself. Watch who’s sacrificing something for whom at the time. Sacrifice is like a ball being passed between every major character throughout the whole movie, and everyone gets a turn.
If you’d rather get sozzled, have what he’s having while watching Casablanca.
This is basically a cowboy movie without horses.