Casablanca (1942) is my favorite movie of all time for a million reasons. It is a surreal experience, though, because it is a World War II movie that was made and released in the middle of World War II.
The Free France resistance was fighting against the Nazi-allied Vichy government while the movie was happening. The Germans deposed the Vichy regime and took full control of occupied France TWO WEEKS before this movie released in theaters. The Allied Forces won’t invade Normandy until one-and-a-half years after this movie won a Best Picture Oscar.
Rick, Ilsa, and Sam reminisce about peacetime in Paris at a time in the real world when there was no guarantee that would ever happen again. And the northern part of Morocco is under Spanish occupation at the time that they wait in Casablanca (and wait… and wait…). Tangier, a former international zone, is also under Spanish occupation until after the war.
I’ve been thinking about the timing and was wondering what other movies were released into such uncertainty, and how they were received. The Battle of Algiers (1966) was shot a few years after the titular conflict and wasn’t screened in France until 1971. The Hurt Locker (2009) was released during the US-led Iraq War and, while an awards darling, is more brazen in showing the toll of the war on all sides compared to how it is handled in Casablanca. Notorious colonialist, jingoist crap The Green Berets was released during the Vietnam War and that’s all we’ll say about it. There are many others, such as The Great Dictator (1940), but Casablanca is compelling to me because the movie is heavy with themes of resistance in the face of uncertainty.
One could argue that most everything released between 1948 and 1989 counts as a Cold War movie, especially luminaries like Doctor Strangelove and M.A.S.H., as the Cold War and global annihilation were omnipresent (threat of nuclear annihilation still is, but we live under it since birth so most don’t think about it any more).
I don’t have a lot else that I want to say right now about Casablanca. It is, as Leonard Maltin said, the best Hollywood movie of all time. Shots, lines, performances, and plot points from this movie have become a part of the language of cinema. It’s very much a weird phenomenon, though, as it was just one of a slew of movies cranked out by Warner Bros. at the time. Its legacy and longevity spring from the perfect storm of timeliness, movie star chemistry, and the universality of its themes.
The film doesn’t say much about European colonialism, and the characters are primarily expatriates, refugees, and exiles, with locals relegated to background color. Given its overarching themes of a world at war, and it being written and filmed in 1942, this can be somewhat forgiven, but the Euroentric/Americentric tendency to showcase a white expat in a foreign clime continues to this day in movies.
I’ve seen Casablanca more times in the theater than anything else, and it is a personal record that I doubt will ever be broken. But every time I see it, I can’t help but think about how weird it must have been to make this movie or watch this movie at a time when large swaths of planet earth were involved in the same war as in the film.