Vice and Virtue: Casablanca

Virtue:

Casablanca is truly a masterpiece. With the combination of romance, betrayal, and a devastating war, we see the main character struggle with sacrificing his own dignity for a greater cause. And, this movie is done in an aesthetic black and white screen, which really made me feel fancy while watching it. When Rick—-iconic name btw—-is faced with his former lover Ilsa Lund who ran out on him (scandal!), what is he going to do? Well, you’ll have to find that out on your own, but here's why you should watch it.

There are so many iconic lines in this movie, and I’m going to have to highlight a couple. When Casablanca’s Captain Louis Renault is telling Rick not to tell this guy Lazlo that he is going to be arrested by the Nazis, Rick says, “I stick my neck out for nobody,” to which Renault responds, “A good foreign policy.” The lines are so subtle, and they just eat every time, like wow that is so true Captain. And while Rick starts off pretty focused on himself and his saloon, we see him come around to realize that his own problems aren’t that deep. 

Another amazing quote is said by Victor Laszlo, the husband of Ilsa Lund—the one that ran out on Rick—and it is, “If we stop breathing we’ll die, and if we stop fighting our enemies the world will die.” These are the kinds of things that stick with you after watching the film. 

It's so clear that Ilsa loves Rick more than her own husband—which is weird since Paul Henreid (Victor Laszlo) is way better looking in my opinion—and yet her husband needs her to fight the war against the Nazis, so she will go with him to do that. In the end, the two lovebirds put their issues aside for the greater good of the world, and Rick says, “I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Basically, he seems neutral and acts like he’s only looking out for himself the whole film, but really we can see that Rick is a sentimentalist.

Vice:

Casablanca: A classic, but should it be? Watching this movie, I couldn’t help but wonder why, more than 80 years later, we endure over an hour and a half of greasy comb overs and comically large shoulder pads. This movie had me yelling “Get over it, dude!” at my television, and not only was Rick’s yearning obnoxious, but it was based on a lie. This movie romanticizes infidelity and lung cancer. Is the gloomy, avant-garde look of cigarette smoke in the black-and-white bars of sunlight through window blinds worth the risk? The man himself, Humphrey Bogart, died tragically young of esophageal cancer. The “peak of cinema” promotes both adultery and cigarette usage indoors. 

Another thing: the best character in the whole film, Sam the piano player, disappears without explanation from the last third of the movie. I spent the whole time trying to figure out where he had gone. Had Rick sold him out? Ultimately, yes. I coveted Sam and his piano, which he was apparently literally attached at the hip to, as he never even so much as walked across Rick’s without dragging it along with him. 

Here’s a question for the reader: are you fluent in French, Russian, German, Spanish, and English? Oh, you’re not? Good luck! This movie features all of these languages, heavily, with such helpful subtitles as: [speaking French], leaving us to scrutinize the characters’ gesticulation in order to have any idea what is going on. 

Casablanca, the city, is famously in the country of Morocco. A fun fact about Morocco: The Metric system has been compulsory since 1923. Why, pray tell, in the year 1942, were the people in this movie using miles? Rick says “Ah, that’s the new German 77. And judging by the sound, only about thirty-five miles away.” Though it’s clearly established he’s an American, he’s lived abroad for years and is surrounded by Europeans, to whom “thirty-five miles” means nothing. Making even less sense, an orderly refers to the runway visibility as “one and one-half miles.” 

Casablanca is an inconsistent and altogether confusing film, whose status as the pinnacle of the art should be rethought.