Bogart's "Casablanca" and Koch and Curtiz's "Mission To Moscow"

Submitted by cathy n on 22 January, 2007 - 11:50

Casablanca, is perhaps the most popular Hollywood movie ever. More than 60 years old, it is now, digitally re-mastered, in the cinemas once again. Paddy Dollard went to see it.

The writer who is credited with putting the politics in Casablanca, the Stalinist Howard Koch, and the director, the talented hack Michael Curtiz, went on in their next assignment to make one of the greatest atrocities in Hollywood’s far from atrocity-scarce history. This was Mission to Moscow, a whitewash job on the Stalinist Moscow show-trials of 1936 to 1938. In one of its scenes, Trotsky is shown selling his services to the Nazis.

We are in the city of Casablanca in the French colony in Morocco. It is, perhaps, 1941. France has been defeated by Germany.

An expatriate American, Rick Blaine runs Rick’s Café Americaine the centre of upper-crust social life in Casablanca. Everybody comes to Rick’s, you might say. The corrupt French policeman, Louis Renault, Nazi Germans, like Major Strasser, refugees from the Nazis, seeking authorisation to travel on to neutral Portugal, and, beyond that, perhaps, to the USA.

In Casablanca, people are killed for their “papers”, visas, “letters of transit”.

Rick possesses great but mysterious power in Casablanca. He is the social lion. He sits in his club playing chess with himself, nodding this one in and the other out of his domain. Himself a refugee who had to flee France, somehow he has become a king amongst the refugees.

Rick is held in respect and awe by everyone else. He is a “man of mystery”, yet it is known that he is on a Nazi blacklist – “their role of honour”, he calls it. Yet the all-ruling Germans can’t touch him here, in the never-never land that is Casablanca. This Casablanca is in fact a place well known in Hollywood westerns, a staple of cowboy films and novels — the town “West of the Pecos”, or wherever, where the law does not run. Everything in the early part of the film goes to emphasise and build up the status of “Mr Rick”.
A desperate man entrusts Letters of Transit, to Rick for safe-keeping, and is then shot by the Germans. These are magical, empowering things: you need only to fill in your name to be able to fly off to Lisbon. Having them gives Rick the power of life and death. Over whom?

Into Casablanca flies “Victor Lazlo”, a Czech “Resistance” leader, who has escaped from a Nazi detention camp, and his companion, Ilsa. Rick is uncharacteristically respectful of Lazlo.

Lazlo is that strange creature that existed nowhere else except in a few Hollywood “anti-fascist” films of that time. He is an “Anti-fascist Resistance leader”, politics unspecified. Such impossible creatures were born where Hollywood, being explicitly political, met Stalinist writers eagerly pretending to be good bourgeois democrats. Hollywood, so to speak, was their mother, Stalinist writers, such as Howard Koch in Casablanca, their father.
Lazlo and Ilsa are trapped in Casablanca. The magic letters of transit would take them out of the reach of the Nazis, and on to America.

We are now in a revenge fantasy. Rick had had an affair with Ilsa in Paris. It ended the day in 1940 when the Nazis conquerors marched into Paris. Rick, who had fought in Spain, has a Nazi “price on his head” and must flee. He had arranges to meet her at the station. In drenching rain, like the Fascist deluge engulfing Europe, he gets a note telling him she is not going with him, and will never see him again.

In fact her husband, Lazlo, whom she’d thought dead, had reappeared, wounded. Knowing Rick has a price on his head, she writes as she does so that he will leave. He leaves, his insides kicked out, by the brutal cutting off. But now, in Casablanca, the embittered Rick has the power of life and death over Ilsa and her companion.

She comes, late at night, to the darkened club, roving searchlights flashing through the window, to explain, and he drunkenly abuses her. When they meet in the market place next day, he, sobered, wants to talk; she is cold and hostile.

In desperation, she comes again, late at night, with a gun,to get the visas. He is sober but unrelenting, spitefully holding out. She tells him that he is a coward and a weakling. Indeed. This is the only time the truth is spoken about him. For what is a person worth, who abandons his cause because of personal disappointment?
She pulls the gun and he tells her to go ahead and shoot him: “you’d be doing me a favour.” This as an abject, self-exposing declaration of his love. She breaks down and regresses, surrendering to the values and central concerns of the man she has justly called “cowardly”, “weak”. She tells him that from now on he must “do the thinking” for both of them. From this point on Ilsa is inert, dead matter, a plot prop.

Rick has gone back with the self-same woman to the situation that caused him to change from a selfless “anti-fascist” into a predatory cynic, and relives it, but now with the power of decision for everyone. He is inspired “by the love of a good woman” to renounce her. In effect he endorses the choice she made in Paris, where she “loved” Rick but chose duty with Lazlo. Her values are vindicated, but now it is his to choose, and she herself is a passive piece of baggage for someone else — Rick — to dispose of. Isla has become a walking affront to self-respecting women in the audience!
Finally at the aerodrome, Rick tells Ilsa that she is going not as she thinks, with him, but with Lazlo. She does as he decides, without a word.

The film is an entirely synthetic confection of well-established Hollywood formulas. The power and revenge fantasies that make up most of it, despite the “noble” self-renunciation by Rick at the end, have more in common with fascism than with any democratic outlook. Yet it still “works”. Why?

It is the mixing that is special, and the combined talent of those who made it.

The cast is wonderful, of course — Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Conrad Veidt. The players include a number of German refugees from Hitler: the nasty Nazi colonel, Conrad Veidt was, with his Jewish wife, a German refugee. Paul Henreid the second hero of the film, was a refugee from Nazi-annexed Austria. Peter Lorre, a Jewish Hungarian, who had made his most important films in pre-Hitler Germany, was also a refugee.
In Britain, in the mid 30s,Veidt had made one of the rare movies of the period which exposed anti-semitism, Jew Suss, based on the historical novel of the same name by Lion Leuchtwanger. In 1940 the Nazis made a notorious anti-semitic film of the same name.
By contrast with the anti-fascists, the Swede Ingrid Bergman had eagerly gone to work in Nazi Germany, and had tried, even after the war started, to keep open the option of going back.

It is perhaps right that one of the sharply jarring notes in the movie comes out of Bergman’s mouth. She does not say “play it again Sam”, but she does refer to the black pianist Dooley Wilson, who would not see 40 again, as “the boy”. That was how Americans referred to black people of all ages then. The US army the great sham of democracy, was not desegregated until two years after Casablanca in 1944.

Though the film takes place in a colony there is not a word about that imperialism. Oran in Algeria is mentioned as a stop off place en route to Casablanca. In Oran in 1945, the resuscitated French state will massacre perhaps 100,000 Algerians who want their liberty.

Perhaps the explanation of why Casablanca still works is this: within its romantic conventions it is a committed film. The villains really are villains, the good guy reluctant but all the more convincing when he gets going.

There is something in it greater than the individual lives of the characters, compared to which their affairs really are “not worth a hill of beans”, as Rick/Bogart says.

And there is an invocation of a possible better world to be had for the fighting.

In short, the film shows the world of official “Allied” World War Two propaganda, hardened and made to gleam magnetically by a tremendously talented team. It is the same “official” anti-fascist world which the British people took seriously enough in 1945 to pursue, by dismissing the respected Tory war leader Winston Churchill and electing, by a landslide, a Labour government pledged to radical change.

Maybe it is the film’s power still to evoke that mood and take its audience into it for a while, away from our own commercial capitalist civilisation, grubby and souless but unashamed — that explains Casablanca’s continuing appeal.

The collection of corny cliches in Casablanca transmuted by talent — as heat transmutes carbon into synthetic diamonds — into a prism for the ideas of an age still conveys to us some glimmer of the as yet unrealised hopes of that age.

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