We must remem­ber this – lessons learned from Casablanca

By rep­u­ta­tion, Casablan­ca is the great­est Amer­i­can romance ever put to cel­lu­loid. There may be films more avant-garde or tech­ni­cal­ly accom­plished, but no film is so com­pul­sive­ly rewatched or intense­ly adored. US Sen­a­tor Eliz­a­beth War­ren returns to Casablan­ca with her hus­band every New Year’s Eve, and Don­ald Trump even made a (los­ing) bid to acquire the famed upright piano that is fea­tured in the Paris flash­backs. Casablan­ca has been so talked about, quot­ed, and repur­posed to ric­o­chet across pop­u­lar cul­ture that Gen Z’s first encounter might eas­i­ly be par­o­dies on Sat­ur­day Night Live or reruns of The Simp­sons.

The prob­lem is that Casablanca’s famil­iar quota­bil­i­ty seems to have immu­nized it from the crit­i­cal ebb and flow that has washed over land­marks such as Cit­i­zen Kane or The God­fa­ther. Eighty years of roman­tic nos­tal­gia has left it polit­i­cal­ly defanged, but in a time of resur­gent author­i­tar­i­an nation­al­ism, it’s worth exca­vat­ing its mes­sage: a full-throat­ed attack on the Amer­i­ca First iso­la­tion­ism that had par­a­lyzed the Unit­ed States under the loom­ing threat of fascism.

At the age of 27, recent Cor­nell grad­u­ate and aspir­ing play­wright Mur­ray Bur­nett took the sum­mer of 1938 to trav­el to Vien­na in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Anschluss, where he wit­nessed the anti­se­mit­ic Nurem­berg Laws come into force in the wake of Nazi annex­a­tion. Flee­ing Jew­ish refugees snaked from Mar­seilles to Moroc­co, on to Lis­bon, then across the Atlantic on the final leg to Amer­i­ca — a trek that even­tu­al­ly got scrupu­lous­ly report­ed in the news­reel open­ing film sequence of Casablanca.

Bur­nett per­son­al­ly smug­gled his Jew­ish family’s prop­er­ty south to Nice, where he stum­bled on a smokey night­club over­look­ing the Mediter­ranean that catered to refugees and mil­i­tary offi­cials. A Black pianist from Chica­go relieved the tense mood with a reper­toire of pop­u­lar jazz stan­dards. Back in the Unit­ed States in 1940, Bur­nett col­lab­o­rat­ed with writer Joan Ali­son to rework his obser­va­tions into ​“Every­body Comes to Rick’s,” an unpro­duced three-act play.

Just five days after the Pearl Har­bor attacks, Warn­er Bros. pro­duc­er Hal Willis dis­cov­ered the play on his desk and snatched it up at the then-unheard price of $20,000. He assigned sib­ling team Julius and Philip Epstein to mold it into a screen­play, with Michael Cur­tiz slat­ed to direct. Tak­en togeth­er, these for­ma­tive cir­cum­stances dri­ve home the point that romance may adorn the film, but its back­bone is the plight of refugees dis­placed by polit­i­cal violence.

Set in the French-con­trolled port city of Moroc­co just beyond the author­i­ty of the Vichy pup­pet gov­ern­ment, the sto­ry cen­ters on a roman­tic love tri­an­gle between immac­u­late­ly tai­lored, chain-smok­ing saloon keep­er Rick (Humphrey Bog­a­rt), his enig­mat­ic ex-lover Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and her hero­ic if stol­id hus­band, Vic­tor Las­z­lo (Paul Hen­reid), an escapee of a Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp and leader of the Czechoslo­vak resis­tance. Rick faces a dilem­ma. He’s acquired two let­ters of tran­sit that could whisk the Las­z­los beyond the reach of Gestapo offi­cer, Major Strass­er (Con­rad Vei­dt), but doing so would irrev­o­ca­bly sun­der his romance with Ilsa.

In its wartime era, Casablan­ca was a dis­si­dent plea to the Amer­i­can pub­lic to alter course. In the ear­ly stages of WWII, a Gallup poll revealed an aston­ish­ing 90% of Amer­i­cans favored iso­la­tion­ism to avoid the fast-bal­loon­ing con­flict across the Atlantic. But Warn­er Bros. execs regard­ed Amer­i­ca First iso­la­tion­ism as a stun­ning betray­al of human­i­tar­i­an oblig­a­tions and a green­light to fas­cism. Broth­ers Har­ry and Jack Warn­er threw their sup­port behind the Anti-Nazi League and began churn­ing out anti-iso­la­tion­ist motion pic­tures, such as Con­fes­sions of a Nazi Spy. The blow­back was so pow­er­ful that Sen­a­tor Ger­ald Nye of North Dako­ta, a leader of the Amer­i­ca First orga­ni­za­tion, con­vened a hear­ing to upbraid them with accu­sa­tions of war­mon­ger­ing. Under a bar­rage of ques­tion­ing, Har­ry replied indig­nant­ly, ​“I am ready to give myself and all of my per­son­al resources to aid in the defeat of the Nazi men­ace to the Amer­i­can people.”

Har­ry kept true to his word in Casablan­ca. Rick moves from burnt-out cyn­i­cism and polit­i­cal iso­la­tion­ism — ​“I stick my neck out for nobody” — to shoot­ing down a Nazi offi­cer and earn­ing Victor’s grat­i­tude for aban­don­ing his mis­an­throp­ic neu­tral­i­ty: ​“Wel­come back to the fight. This time, I know our side will win.”

Casablan­ca is unmoored from the Amer­i­ca First ethos in oth­er ways. Just as Rick has rebuffed Victor’s pleas for the let­ters of tran­sit, Ger­man sol­diers burst into song with ​“Die Wacht am Rhein,” taunt­ing refugees from the Ger­man war machine. In response, Rick nods approval to the band to launch into a stir­ring ren­di­tion of ​“La Marseillaise.”

The French Nation­al Anthem acts as the film’s patri­ot­ic bal­last. It con­geals refugees who have fled from dozens of coun­tries and war­zones behind a com­mon cul­tur­al touch­stone, silenc­ing the bel­li­cose nation­al­ism of the Ger­mans but also answer­ing head-on the Amer­i­ca First posi­tion that moral oblig­a­tions are neat­ly tram­meled by nation­al bor­ders. Author­i­tar­i­an regimes do not stop at nation­al bound­aries, and, as the cho­rus of voic­es affirms, nei­ther does the deter­mi­na­tion to throw off the yoke of tyranny.

The cast lit­er­al­ly rep­re­sent­ed the transna­tion­al coali­tion of refugees that were plead­ing against Amer­i­ca First iso­la­tion­ism. Near­ly all of the rough­ly 75 actors who appeared on screen were refugees or immi­grants, hail­ing from more than 30 nations, and of the 14 who earned screen cred­it, only three were born in the US: Humphrey Bog­a­rt, Doo­ley Wil­son, and Joy Page. Ingrid Bergman was Swedish; Paul Hen­reid was Aus­tro-Hun­gar­i­an; Peter Lorre, por­tray­ing Ugarte, was a Ger­man-speak­ing émi­gré from Slo­va­kia; and most inter­est­ing­ly, Con­rad Vei­dt, por­tray­ing Nazi vil­lain Major Strass­er, was a Ger­man refugee who’d been detained by and then fled from the Third Reich after it rose to pow­er in 1933. The com­po­si­tion of the cast was itself evi­dence that the car­nage being vis­it­ed on Europe was wash­ing up on Amer­i­can shores and could not be ignored or contained.

Casablan­ca would lat­er become con­ge­nial to future gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­cans in part because it reject­ed a key fea­ture of the Amer­i­ca First sen­si­bil­i­ty: its deep-seat­ed racism. The inti­ma­cy depict­ed between a Black pianist and a white saloon keep­er who knock back drinks togeth­er and bind their fates in friend­ship would have been near­ly unthink­able in ear­ly 1940s Amer­i­ca. Tom Doher­ty, a cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an at Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty, notes that Casablan­ca dou­bles as both a geo­graph­i­cal and imag­i­na­tive space: ​“Casablan­ca cajoled Amer­i­cans to real­ize their high­er aspi­ra­tions, not just by con­fronting fas­cism abroad but by imag­in­ing a com­mu­ni­ty that had top­pled racial hierarchies.”

From our van­tage point in 2022, Casablanca’s mes­sage seems not to be break­ing through. Nativist iso­la­tion­ism has rip­pled across the globe over the last decade. Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi rose to pow­er on a wave of Hin­du nation­al­ism scape­goat­ing Mus­lims. The Swedish right has mus­cled its way into par­lia­ment by pin­ning blame on immi­grants. Hungary’s Vik­tor Orbán has seized on the Great Replace­ment con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry to con­sol­i­date domes­tic sup­port. Mean­while, back in the Unit­ed States, Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy has announced he’ll choke resources to Ukraine to hoard them at home, there­by align­ing for­eign pol­i­cy with Steve Bannon’s far-right vision of Amer­i­ca First.

Noah Isen­berg, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin and author of We’ll Always Have Casablan­ca, told me that the aspi­ra­tional spir­it of Casablan­ca is a coun­terblast to divi­sive xeno­pho­bic politics.

“Don­ald Trump ripped at the fab­ric of democ­ra­cy — cap­i­tal­iz­ing on a glob­al pan­dem­ic to sow fear and divi­sion, stok­ing con­tempt for Syr­i­an refugees, and launch­ing a coup to cling to pow­er when he lost the elec­tion,” Isen­berg said. ​“He tru­ly rep­re­sents the inverse of every­thing Casablan­ca stands for — name­ly, sub­or­di­nat­ing per­son­al inter­ests for the greater good. But Casablan­ca reminds us that no mat­ter how dispir­it­ed we’ve become by the cor­rup­tion around us, we always have the pow­er to rise to the occa­sion and exert our­selves in defense of free­dom and equality.”

Casablan­ca, it turns out, has all the trap­pings of a schmaltzy romance, but its clar­i­on call to become our best selves at times of grave polit­i­cal per­il has nev­er been timelier.