Casablanca: What is a Classic?
What is a "classic?"
Something made before you were born? Something in black and white? Something that you were introduced to by a loved one? Something you have an emotional connection to?
Everyone has their own answer, but when asked the question, you've got to at least consider Casablanca—even if you haven't seen it. Maybe especially if you haven't seen it.
Casablanca is the purest example of the "Golden Age of Cinema." A heavy-shadowed noir with impeccable lighting, superstar romantic leads, great character actors—and quotable lines that have been memed, mixed, parodied, referenced, mocked, and reclaimed thousands of times in the 80+ years since its release.
Even people who haven't seen it know the basics. A soup of pop culture references, like the tacky paintings pressed onto diner walls where Bogart sips milkshakes with James Dean. Nostalgia defined and commodified, flattened and shrink-wrapped and mass-produced, until even the silhouettes of the characters are recognizable, their words processed and twisted until they are not endlessly quoted, but endlessly misquoted, like "Play it again, Sam"—a line that no one in the film ever utters.
What do people mean when they say "Play it again, Sam?" Or "Here's looking at you, kid?" Or "We'll always have Paris?" Does anyone even know anymore? These lines have been elevated to the pop culture pantheon alongside other memes like "Mai waife!" and "Luke, I am your father"—another common misquote—with no consideration that these were once written by a screenwriter, memorized by an actor, and delivered on a set. Lines that were created to evoke an emotional response unique to the film they were written for have now been disseminated throughout modern culture, stripped of their initial meaning, now heavy with personal emotional investment.
With all the misquotes, tacky posters, bad Halloween costumes, and Animaniacs parodies, of course, Casablanca is "good." If it wasn't, how has it survived? We all know Casablanca is "good," even if we haven't seen it.
But here's the thing: Casablanca is REALLY FUCKING GOOD.
It's good now, in 2023, and it was good in 1983. It was good in 1953 when it was rediscovered and elevated beyond the standard studio picture the cast and crew thought they were creating: another noir romance, with maybe a touch of geopolitical reference to add authenticity, rushed out the door by the studio when the actual Second World War made the film's themes all too relevant.
It is astonishing this was made DURING WW2. Every character represents their own country's involvement in a war that was being fought while the cameras were rolling.
Bogart's Rick is an American opportunist, made cynical by personal heartbreak, secretly doing the right thing behind everyone's backs—or whenever it suits him. Bergman's Ilsa is an Eastern European refugee who is wracked with guilt over her romance with Rick in Paris while her lover was tortured by the Nazis. The only real hero in the film is Paul Heinreid's Lazlo, a world-famous resister who uses the power of nationalism, courage, and a brass band to wage a guerilla culture war against the Nazis.
The standout is Claude Rains as the local police captain, a pure opportunist who hangs out at Rick's to collect blackmail material and because he just likes the guy. In a movie literally stuffed with character actors, even the cartoonish performances have meaning, like Rick's jovial German stereotype. No scene is wasted, every line lands.
And those lines!
"Here's looking at you, kid." What starts as a cliched pickup line Rick has probably used on hundreds of girls morphs into a requiem for the time they had, the people they used to be, forever destroyed by war and heartbreak.
"Play it, Sam." The "it" is "As Time Goes By", a song about the fundamentals of romance and how love can survive the most horrific occurrences. A song loaded with the movie's themes written ten years earlier. Sam's reluctance to play the song for Rick or Isla and how he tries to pull Rick out of his depression gives Sam way more depth than any parody allows, where he is often portrayed as a piano-playing idiot savant. Rick saved Sam from Paris at great cost to his own happiness, and Sam's debt is to keep his boss happy and distracted—something Ilsa's arrival makes impossible.
Finally, "We'll always have Paris." Often omitted from this quote is the rest of the line:
"We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night."
The film's thesis distilled into three sentences, circling back to the groundwork laid by "Here's looking at you, kid" and "Play it, Sam." How many people even know this line comes from Casablanca? That it's Rick's last-ditch attempt to get her on the plane, absolving her of the guilt she feels for leaving him in Paris and to absolve herself for romancing Rick in the first place, for daring to be happy when her husband, the film's real hero, who roused an entire city with nothing but La Marseillaise, was languishing in a German concentration camp.
It's breathtaking writing from a forgotten, unproduced play, delivered by one of the world's biggest movie stars, who thought he was making just another in a long line of forgettable studio pictures, elevated and sanitized and polished to a mirror sheen by pop culture erosion. The dopamine hits like a tidal wave: the peanut butter of nostalgic recognition blending with the chocolate of expert filmmaking.
If classics are tenured members of the faculty of film, some of them, as relics of their time, aren't allowed to teach anymore. But Casablanca is out there giving 1 hour and 52-minute lectures on the transcendent power of a good story, well told, every day.