For many, Casablanca is not just any old movie but the old movie. When Woody Allen was looking for a heroic exemplar for his nebbish cineaste in Play it Again, Sam, it was to Bogart’s Rick Blaine that he turned. When Nora Ephron wanted to illustrate the practicality of women in When Harry Met Sally, it was Bergman’s example she held up (“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Casablanca married to a man who owns a bar”). The source of endless spin-offs, parodies and skits, from the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca to Saturday Night Live, Casablanca is the movie we go to when we want to invoke movieishness itself, the dream factory at full tilt, a heroic foil to our mock-heroic age. As Umberto Eco put it in Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage, “It is movies”.
This cultural ubiquity has entailed a certain sniffiness from critics, whose estimation has tended to chime with the Warner Brothers script reader who first assessed the screenplay: “Excellent melodrama. Colourful, timely background, tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum.” The Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, fully paid-up members of the cult of Bogie, none the less preferred his films with Howard Hawks and John Huston. Even Pauline Kael called it “a movie that demonstrates how entertaining a bad movie can be”. And that is how most approach it: as camp, endlessly screened in revival houses such as Harvard’s Brattle theatre, where it played from 1957 to audiences of student activists thrilling to its dramatisation of doing the right thing in a world turned upside down. At one screening in the late Sixties, according to the New Yorker’s David Denby, during the final reel the sound failed and the audience, speaking as one, recited the actors’ words for them, finishing the film up to its famous last line, “Louis, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
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