Casablanca Is a Wonderful Film--Arguably the Best Film Ever; Here's What We Can Learn about Radical Organizing From It
I'm talking about what makes people--like 'Rick'--tick
I recently stumbled upon a very insightful review by Ian Lang1 of the film, Casablanca, which I am including in full for your convenience in this footnote.2
I am writing a Substack post about this film not because it is arguably the greatest film ever produced (which I think it is) but because of one of its key themes, which directly relates to whether, or how, we try to build an egalitarian revolutionary movement. That theme is what Ian Lang calls redemption3—personal redemption of an individual who is cynical and self-centered but is transformed into a person who makes a great personal sacrifice for a noble cause.
The setting of Casablanca is Vichy (i.e., essentially Nazi)-controlled Morocco early in World War II (the film came out in 1942) where Rick (Humphrey Bogart) owns Rick's Café. The noble cause that Rick (and two other persons in the film) must decide whether or not to support by making a great personal sacrifice is the cause of substantially helping the Allies to defeat the Nazis.
Here are the first words in Ian Lang’s review (answering the question: Why is Casablanca considered such a classic?) that explain the theme of redemption in the film:
It wasn’t actually meant to be. They filled it with star names, but nobody expected more than a usual performance from Casablanca.
However, in adapting it from the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s, Howard Koch and the Epsteins inadvertently stumbled upon the universal theme of redemption, a common leitmotiv in well-regarded stories, and milked it skillfully and without clumsiness.
The three redeemed characters are Rick, a former gun-runner and disillusioned Loyalist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, descended into a life of hedonism and petty crime in a gin-joint in Casablanca, Renault, the vain, corrupt, and bone-idle Prefect, and Ilsa, who really had no tangible need for redemption other than that she had deserted Rick (her one-time paramour) on discovering that her husband was still alive. Her redemption comes in her willingness to stay with Rick whilst Laszlo escapes from the occupied territories to Portugal. Rick’s redemption comes from him using the letters (which he had gained from an illegal source) of transit to allow both Laszlo and Ilsa to escape together, despite his knowing that he will never see Ilsa again.
Rick also has a moment of sub-redemption during the scene whereby the French clientele are allowed to sing the Marseillaise, drowning out the Germans singing Die Wacht am Rhein. This too comes at personal cost; Renault is ordered by Strasser to close down the club.
Renault’s redemption has to wait until the very end. Ilsa and Laszlo have got away, but Rick has had to shoot Strasser dead under the very eyes of the Prefect. Renault could easily save his own skin here by turning in Rick.
“Round up the usual suspects” he orders his men. And then he and Rick walk away into a fog, intending to join the Free French in Brazaville as the film concludes.
This is a sublime finale that would in the Classical Ages have had audiences swooning.
What does this have to do with egalitarian revolutionary organizing?
Egalitarian revolutionary organizing aims to persuade hundreds of millions of people to behave in a way that is very different from how they behave presently, to switch from acting purely in their personal (or family or relatively small circle of concern) interest by adapting as best they can to the unjust social system they live in, to instead joining together in rising up to overthrow that unjust social system even if it requires making great personal sacrifices.
What could possibly cause people to change this way? What exactly made Rick and Renault and Ilsa change this way?
It turns out that Casablanca illustrates what can make people change this way, but it is something that I have until now not sufficiently appreciated. Let me start saying what I mean by first re-capping what I have been saying about this in the past.
As I wrote about in “What Causes a Political Sea Change,” I learned in 1969 what can make people change this way. What’s required is that lots of people 1) know they are morally right in wanting to make an anti-establishment change; and 2) know they are in the VAST MAJORITY in wanting to make that change. When these two conditions are both satisfied, then and only then is there an uprising. There is an uprising in this case because people are no longer hopeless about the possibility of making an important change in the world.
As I have written about (over and over and over again, I know) one of the main obstacles to the growth of an egalitarian revolutionary movement is hopelessness. Specifically, people who would love an egalitarian revolution, despite being the vast majority in this aspiration, believe (because the ruling class works hard to make them believe) that they are a tiny and hence impotent minority. They thus naturally believe it is impossible to build a large and successful egalitarian revolutionary movement. They are hopeless in this regard. And as I keep pointing out, hopelessness results in behavior that looks, from the outside, as if it came from apathy (not caring) but it does not. People care very much about the fact that we live in a dictatorship of the rich where the rich treat the have-nots like dirt; they just don’t believe anything can be done to change that unfortunate fact. So they don’t try.
Here’s what Casablanca makes me realize is ALSO necessary for what Ian Lang calls redemption.
People need to know that they, personally, can indeed make an important difference in furthering a noble cause.
The people who rose up to change the world in mass movements of history that won important reforms, such as the abolition of the racist Jim Crow laws in the United States and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, were people who believed that they personally could make a difference, that what they did really mattered. The reasons why they believed this may not have been as dramatic as the reasons that led to the redemption of the characters in Casablanca, but they were just as important.
In World War II Casablanca, Rick and the others knew that defeating the Nazis was an extremely important cause and they also knew that LOTS of people in the world were fighting for that cause. But—and this is key!—until certain things happened in the Casablanca plot, these individuals did not know that they could, by a purely personal act entailing great personal sacrifice, make a very substantial contribution to the noble cause of defeating the Nazis. (Watch the film if you haven’t already to learn why this was the case.)
Until these characters knew, due to new circumstances in their lives—namely that they happened to be uniquely positioned unlike anybody else to personally make an important contribution to defeating the Nazis by making a great personal sacrifice—they had no reason to stop acting in the cynical self-serving manner they had been acting for many years. Until they encountered the life-changing circumstances that changed what they believed about whether they could make a real difference in the world, they felt hopeless about being able to do anything significant to help defeat the Nazis, and so they did not try.
But notice this important fact! If Rick and the others had been apathetic people, people who just didn’t care if the Nazis were defeated or not, then there would have been zero redemption—zero change in their cynical self-serving behavior—when they encountered the new circumstances in their lives that, in the film, gave them hope and thereby led to their redemption.
My point here is that redemption (changing from a cynic to an activist) is not a fundamental change in the inherent nature or quality of a person; it is not a change from being a bad person to somehow being mysteriously transformed into a good person. The redeemed person is the same person as the earlier un-redeemed person; what has changed is the circumstances in the person’s life, from earlier circumstances that made hopelessness and consequently political passivity seem the only sensible way to feel and behave, to novel circumstances that made activism and even self-sacrifice seem the only sensible way to behave.
As egalitarian revolutionaries we must never forget that political passivity is almost always NOT due to apathy but due to hopelessness. There is nothing that can make an apathetic person stop being apathetic. If apathy were the main reason for political passivity then I would say we should just give up. But it’s not! Politically passive people are almost always like Rick in Casablanca: good people who may feel hopeless now but won’t necessarily feel hopeless tomorrow.
No doubt there are in fact some people who, with respect to the noble goal of egalitarian revolution, are truly apathetic; they just don’t care one way or the other. But based on my experience (such as what I report here), the vast majority people are NOT apathetic; they are (for the time being) hopeless. This is why I say the main strategy (discussed here) today for egalitarian revolutionaries is to do things that make people hopeful about the possibility of egalitarian revolution, and the main thing that does make people feel hopeful is learning that they are the vast majority in wanting such a revolution.
There may also occur new circumstances in people’s personal lives that, as in Casablanca, cause redemption.4 We can’t control if and when and how this may happen. But we can be glad that it probably will, and it will result in redemption because most people are not apathetic, just hopeless.
who, while writing insightfully about Casablanca, alas posts very un-insightfully about Israel and Palestine
This is a Quora post in answer to the question: Why is Casablanca considered such a classic?
Leading Technician
It wasn’t actually meant to be. They filled it with star names, but nobody expected more than a usual performance from Casablanca.
However, in adapting it from the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s, Howard Koch and the Epsteins inadvertently stumbled upon the universal theme of redemption, a common leitmotiv in well-regarded stories, and milked it skillfully and without clumsiness.
The three redeemed characters are Rick, a former gun-runner and disillusioned Loyalist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, descended into a life of hedonism and petty crime in a gin-joint in Casablanca, Renault, the vain, corrupt, and bone-idle Prefect, and Ilsa, who really had no tangible need for redemption other than that she had deserted Rick (her one-time paramour) on discovering that her husband was still alive. Her redemption comes in her willingness to stay with Rick whilst Laszlo escapes from the occupied territories to Portugal. Rick’s redemption comes from him using the letters (which he had gained from an illegal source) of transit to allow both Laszlo and Ilsa to escape together, despite his knowing that he will never see Ilsa again.
Rick also has a moment of sub-redemption during the scene whereby the French clientele are allowed to sing the Marseillaise, drowning out the Germans singing Die Wacht am Rhein. This too comes at personal cost; Renault is ordered by Strasser to close down the club.
Renault’s redemption has to wait until the very end. Ilsa and Laszlo have got away, but Rick has had to shoot Strasser dead under the very eyes of the Prefect. Renault could easily save his own skin here by turning in Rick.
“Round up the usual suspects” he orders his men. And then he and Rick walk away into a fog, intending to join the Free French in Brazaville as the film concludes.
This is a sublime finale that would in the Classical Ages have had audiences swooning.
The theme of redemption alone would have made Casablanca a memorable film, but perhaps not a great one. However, Koch and the Epsteins managed to interject comic interludes entirely in accordance with Commedia dell'arte. Renault is a perfect Capitano, Sam is the equally perfect Pierrot.
The joining to the formal comedy of the mini-Bildungsroman on the theme of redemption would have made Casablanca a standout film. But they hadn’t done yet. I have alluded to one scene in this film before but I am going to again because there are some chapters in literature which define whole novels and in the film industry there are scenes which are a watershed.
For instance, if you are familiar with The Terminator, there is a scene where Sarah Connor bandages Reese’s wound. This is the subtle watershed in this film; it marks the moment of transition of her journey from frightened protegé to becoming the determined protector. The equivalent for Casablanca is the Marseillaise scene.
This is an extremely powerful scene. It denotes the very moment of change for Rick. It also marks the moment a weak spark of defiance is kindled in Renault; he is not yet ready to forgo his venality and comfort, but something is awakened. Claude Rains was a superb character actor, and like all such can act with his face alone. This is Renault’s face as the Germans are singing:
look at the disgust this man expresses. A few seconds later he shares a glance with Rick. Laszlo orders the band to strike up the Marsellaise, the band look to Rick for confirmation, and Rick nods.
Now look at the French clientele singing.
Those extras behind Paul Henried are not run-of the-mill extras. Many of them are French and had escaped narrowly the Nazi occupation and Vichy partition of their country. Remember this is 1942 and the Germans still occupy France. Here, the Anglo actors take a back seat for a minute; the extras come forth and they are not acting. They are real French people expressing their anguish. And this would strike a chord too with the Anglo world; most of it had been involved in the struggle against Nazi Germany for nearly three years and the USA had recently been dragged in too.
There are few equivalent scenes in cinematic history and none superlative to it. However great your actors are, they cannot in this modern day recreate the emotional depth of this scene simply because the conditions that produced it no longer exist; this is why no studio is willing to take the risk of remaking Casablanca as they know it will be inferior to the original.
But they hadn’t even finished there. We have the redemption leitmotiv, the superlative formal comedy, and a scene so powerful that few can match it. And at the root of it all a doomed love story between the two protagonists caught in an unwitting menage-a-trois. This is the script of their last conversation:
Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I've done a lot of it since then, and it all adds up to one thing: you're getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.
Ilsa: But, Richard, no, I... I...
Rick: Now, you've got to listen to me! You have any idea what you'd have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten, we'd both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn't that true, Louie?
Captain Renault: I'm afraid Major Strasser would insist.
Ilsa: You're saying this only to make me go.
Rick: I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
Ilsa: But what about us?
Rick: We'll always have Paris. We didn't have, we, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.
Rick: And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.
[Ilsa lowers her head and begins to cry]
Rick: Now, now...
[Rick gently places his hand under her chin and raises it so their eyes meet]
Rick: Here's looking at you kid.
As a highbrow literary piece the above has little merit. As a rhetorical piece, the same. As a screen dialogue for a film, it is remarkable; it wraps up the denouement, emphasises the redemption of both men and the woman, closes several sub-plots, encompasses contemporary concerns, and makes circular references all the way back to the beginning. It does all of that in less than two minutes of entirely vernacular dialogue.
Screenplay writing is very different from novel or short story and whether they intended to or not Koch and the Epsteins managed to find an entirely satisfactory bridge between to produce a film with both commercial and artistic appeal. Of course a first-rate cast and crew helped, but a good cast with a poor narrative gives a mediocre performance. The four items above allied to a romantic tragedy with comic interludes set against troubling contemporary issues produced something that became greater than the sum of its parts, and probably will be seen so as long as cinema exists.
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The dictionary definition of the word “redemption,” by the way, is “the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.”
Is this not what Schindler's List was all about? Is this not why it was such a popular film. I’m only asking because I never saw the film.
Casablanca was banned on March 19, 1942, for infringing on the Emergency Powers Order (EPO), preserving wartime neutrality in the way it portrayed Vichy France and Nazi Germany in a "sinister light."
After its 1942 ban, Casablanca was later passed with cuts on June 15, 1945, after the Emergency Powers Order (EPO) was lifted – this time the cuts were to dialogue between Rick and Ilsa referring to their love affair. It seemed even talking about affairs was forbidden.
[So they didn’t have Paris?]
Thanks John. You can identify the moment of Rick's redemtion when he nods to the band to strike up the Marseillaise. Also the Western, Shane was of a similar nature when he urges the homesteaders to resist the ranchers.