The word propaganda has sinister connotations. Hearing the word makes me think of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, whose secret to success was defined in his famous quote:
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.It's also makes me think of the current dictator of Russia who recently used the feckless Tucker Carlson as a vehicle to distribute nonsense, trying to justify his criminal invasion of Ukraine to any American willing to listen.
But propaganda is not the sole domain of tyrants, and while it implies bias, it needn't consist of misinformation or outright lies.
Does that mean there can be good propaganda? I guess that all depends upon whose propaganda it is and which side you're on.
In the mid-1930s, Americans were reeling from the Great Depression. Many men in this country who were approaching middle age were still living with the memories and the effects of what was arguably the most terrifying war from the viewpoint of the average soldier, World War I.
The same was true in Europe only more so. The big difference is in Europe, another war was on the horizon. And the vast majority of Americans at the time wanted no part of it. Who can blame them?
The support for isolationism and non-intervention in foreign wars among Americans in the thirties was overwhelming. So much so that Congress passed several neutrality acts late in the decade, which not even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in marked opposition to them, would dare veto.
The chief problem with those acts is that they were blanket declarations, forbidding any kind of participation or aid in a foreign conflict, even in support of an ally who was attacked. Roosevelt understood the threat that Hitler and the Nazis posed to the free world, but politically there was little if anything he could do about it until September 1, 1939.
On that day, the Nazis invaded Poland resulting in Britain and France declaring war on Germany. This changed American public opinion only slightly. FDR managed to push through arms sales to the Allies on a cash and carry basis which passed with only a small majority in Congress. Eventually the Allies' reserve of liquid currency began to run out and Britain, alone in Europe in the fight against Hitler after the Nazis marched into Paris, was desperate.
Enter Lend-Lease, Roosevelt's plan to send arms and materiel to the Allies free of charge with the stipulation that the supplies be returned after the conflict. The president used marketing, (another word for propaganda) to explain his plan to the American people by appealing to their sense of self-interest. He used the simple analogy of a homeowner lending a neighbor his garden hose to put out a fire. The logic was that A) putting out the fire while it was still small not only would save the neighbor's house but perhaps also the home of the lender and B) the hose would be returned when it was no longer needed.
Roosevelt succeeded in passing the Lend-Lease Act which was signed in March of 1941. Again, much of the country balked.
That is exactly where the United States stood when the main action in the film Casablanca takes place.
In one of the film's most famous scenes, Rick is alone, drinking himself into a stupor after earlier that evening, the love of his life walked into his nightclub in the arms of another man. It is very late, long after the joint has shut down for the night. Sam walks in and tries to console his friend but to no avail. Rick asks Sam a curious question: "It's December, 1941, what time is it in New York?" "My watch broke" replies Sam, We understand the question better with Rick's next line: "I bet they're sleeping in New York, I bet they're sleeping all over America."
I saw Casablanca probably a dozen times before I noticed the "It's December, 1941" part. During all those viewings I just assumed Rick was commenting on how really late at night it was; if they're asleep in New York, it must be at least 3am in Casablanca, if the rest of America is asleep, even later.
But if it was December, 1941, they were also figuratively asleep all over America, as Europe and the Pacific were going up in flames. On the seventh day of that month, we were finally awakened.
Until I noticed Rick curiously pointing out the date, the ambiguity of that line was lost on me, along with one of the film's most important aspects. Along with being a splendid wartime drama and love story with elements of film noir, mystery, suspense, and even comedy thrown in, above all, Casablanca was a propaganda film.
The message the film was marketing to the American people and to the rest of the world was clearly anti-fascism. We learn in the film that in the years before the action takes place, its protagonist Rick Blaine had actively fought on the Republican side against the Franquistas in Spain and had run guns to the Ethiopians in their struggle against Fascist Italy. Meanwhile the other hero Victor Laszlo was busy fighting the Nazis.
The line with the double meaning was written before December 7, 1941. but the film wasn't shot until the following year, well after the United States had entered World War II. Why then bother including the line in the film which wasn't originally set to be released until 1943, long after we as a country had supposedly woken up?
My theory is that as much as Casablanca was making a clear statement against our enemies in the war, the film is also a critique of American society, at least the part of it that still had reservations about our participation in the war, many of whom had sympathies with and philosophical ties to the Nazis.
There was a great deal of anti-Nazi sentiment during the thirties in Hollywood. Warner Brothers (who produced Casablanca) was especially active having closed all its operations in Germany back in 1934. But American film companies were hesitant to make anti-Nazi films as the Hays Office (see my last post), strongly discouraged production of movies that had biases against foreign countries including Germany, out of fear of offending both the country, and this nation's German speaking population,
So rather than making overtly anti-German films, in 1937, Warner Brothers produced two movies that were set in the United States, but were unmistakable allegories for what was going on in Europe at the time. Black Legion, (with Humphrey Bogart) was a fictional story about a white supremacist group in Detroit modeled after the KKK. They Won't Forget (with Claude Rains), was a fictionalized account of the real-life story of Leo Frank, a young Jewish man who was (by most accounts wrongfully) convicted and lynched for the murder of a 13 year old girl in Atlanta.
In 1940, after the war began in Europe, Warner Brothers purchased the rights to Everybody Comes to Rick's, an anti-Nazi play written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The film company paid a king's ransom for the work, all the more so as the play had never been produced. By then, other film companies felt the time was right to make anti-Nazi propaganda films. Some were forgettable such as Hitler-Beast of Berlin, others were classics like Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
Yet there were still Americans who felt the time wasn't right to offend the Nazis. In 1941, members of Congress conducted hearings investigating Hollywood's anti-Nazi "motion picture propaganda". The two senators who initiated the hearings were Gerald Nye of North Dakota and D. Worth Clark of Idaho. Both senators had ties to the America First Committee, a group founded in 1940 to promote isolationism. Two of the group's most prominent members were industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, both barely concealed anti-Semites. On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh who had Nazi sympathies, gave an infamous speech in Des Moines where bemoaning "the Jewish problem", claimed that Jews were controlling "our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government” all in the effort along with FDR and the British, to lure us into the war.
In response President Roosevelt commented:
When I read Lindbergh’s speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.
It all became moot after December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later the America First Committee was no more. We were at war with both Japan and Germany and work was well underway to turn Everybody Comes to Rick's, which the writer James Agee claimed was the worst play ever written, into the screenplay for what was to become Casablanca, which some to this day claim to be the best movie ever made.
My argument that Casablanca should be in the running to be considered among the best of the best*, is the fact that over eighty years after its release, it continues to speak to us in its universal themes of love and sacrifice, of values and forgiveness, of right and wrong, of the importance of looking beyond our self-interest, and the lengths we would go just to survive.
In light of the last decade, especially the last two years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and even more recently, the war in Gaza , Casablanca is especially relevant today.
My current obsession with the movie was inspired by the resemblance of the late Alexei Navalny, the heroic Russian opposition leader, to the character Victor Laszlo. Mind you it is only a superficial resemblance at best. Once out of harm's way in a German hospital after being poisoned in Russia, the real Navalny returned to Russia to carry on his work, where he knew he would end up in prison, standing a good chance of meeting an untimely death as is the case with everyone who runs afoul of Vladimir Putin. That chance became a reality this February 16 in a gulag in Siberia.
Navalny's life and tragic death touched people's lives far and wide. Even Putin's two most useful idiots in the United States couldn't stay silent. Without placing any blame, Tucker Carlson said: "The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it." Donald Trump went one step further paying Navalny the greatest compliment his twisted mind could come up with, comparing Navalny's ordeal with his own.
The fictional Victor Laszlo's life was peaceful by comparison, escaping Europe for the relative safety of America. But there is one particular line in the movie that by changing a few words, could define Navalny's legacy.
As he is interrogated by the antagonist in the film, Major Strasser of the Gestapo (Conrad Weidt), Laszlo is offered his freedom if he divulges the names of the resistance members all over Europe with whom he has been in contact. After refusing to comply he explains to the Major the inevitable futility of the cause of the Nazis and all totalitarian movements:
Relevant or not, an eighty-year-old movie is bound to appear dated, especially when it comes to current attitudes, values and sensibilities, and Casablanca is no exception. I generally shy away from judging the past through the lens of contemporary standards; however I believe that blindly dismissing acts of the past as simply products of their time is a cop-out.
One objection I've read about Casablanca is that despite being a movie about refugees from Nazi Germany, no Jews are depicted. On one hand, this is a curious assertion as while there was no attempt to identify characters in the film as being Jewish, there is absolutely no reason to believe they were not Jewish. The fact is a great number of people responsible for making Casablanca, from the authors of the play it was based upon, to the screenwriters, the director, and the producer of the movie, to the owners of the company that made the film, were Jewish. Even more telling is that a high percentage of the cast was Jewish, themselves refugees from the Nazis.
Perhaps the film makers elected to portray World War II as a crisis affecting all of humanity by not singling out any one particular ethnic identity as its victims.
On the other hand, the dark side is that the makers of the film had to have been cognizant of the fact that had they emphasized the Jewishness of the refugees, they would have been called out in the antisemitic climate of the U.S. by folks such as Lindbergh, as being producers of Jewish propaganda.
Another bone the filmmakers threw at potential American censors including the OWI, (Office of War Information, the official department of U.S. wartime propaganda) was to give the impression that America was the great beacon of hope for the world's oppressed, who opened its arms to anyone who sought refuge here. That could not have been further from the truth as the U.S. imposed strict immigration quotas even on refugees, based upon ethnicity and race.
In 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis departed Hamburg with 937 passengers aboard, nearly all of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The ship was bound for Cuba where the refugees hoped to stay until visas for them to enter the United States were granted. During the trans-Atlantic voyage, the government of Cuba rescinded its offer to accept the refugees. When the ship docked in the port of Havana, only a handful of passengers, those with the appropriate immigration documents were allowed to disembark. The ship with rest of its passengers aboard sailed north toward Miami where they hoped to land safely. But the immigration quota of the U.S. was already filled, there was in fact a waiting list a mile long and welcoming the refugees aboard the St. Louis into the country would have meant they would have "jumped in line" ahead of those who had already applied for entry.
Rules are rules after all.
The United States could have raised the immigration quota on humanitarian grounds but the vast majority of Americans, many of whom were sympathetic to the plight of the refugees aboard the St. Louis, were still opposed to changing the quota. The same situation applied in Canada.
Without any other option, the ship sailed back to Europe where some of the passengers were granted asylum in Great Britain. Those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones ended up in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, all of which would become occupied by the Germans. Some of those refugees were eventually able to obtain immigration visas to the United States. Of the rest who did not, 254 souls, more than one quarter of those who departed Hamburg on the St. Louis for a new life in America, perished in the Holocaust.
The refugee situation only got worse in the States as the war waged on. Among the refugees aboard one ship headed for the United States was a confirmed Nazi spy. The government used this bit of anecdotal evidence to mount a case for the inherent danger of allowing refugees into this country, and further restricted immigration, despite the mounting evidence of genocide in Europe.
While the race and ethnicity of the refugees depicted in the movie were never established, the character of Sam was unequivocally black. That goes back to the original play, where the character of a different name who would become Sam in the movie, was identified throughout the play's script simply as "the NEGRO". The screenwriters gave Sam a little more humanity, identifying him by name in the film script, but they wrote his lines in what could best be described as a white person's idea of the way black people speak.
Here's a little snippet of the script's dialog between Sam and Rick:
RICK:Sam, Ferrari wants you to work for him at the Blue Parrot.SAM:Ah likes it fine here.RICK:He'll double what I pay you here.SAM:Ah ain't got time to spend what ah makes here.
Fortunately, Dooley Wilson who played Sam, toned down the patois considerably.
In the line that immediately proceeds this dialog, the aforementioned Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) offers to buy Rick's nightclub, along with its piano player Sam. Rick responds: "I don't buy or sell human beings." That line was obviously written to help establish Rick's left-of-center credentials. It was hardly revolutionary in 1941, nearly eighty years after the issue of slavery was resolved in this country. But you can begin to appreciate the line when you consider that a mere three years earlier, Hollywood produced Gone With the Wind, a movie that earnestly celebrated the antebellum South and the institution of slavery with as much glee as Mel Brooks's farcical music number "Springtime for Hitler" celebrated the Nazis.
In his commentary to Casablanca that I linked to in my previous post, Roger Ebert argues that Sam, a black man and Rick, a white man are equals in the film, something unheard of in Hollywood at the time. Well, the being equal part is not entirely true as Sam is in Rick's employ. But he is Rick's best friend and only male friend whose relationship is not transactional. Yes, Sam gets a paycheck from Rick but as is made abundantly clear, he could do better elsewhere if he chose.
As tempting as it is to say that Casablanca was ahead of the curve if only slightly in terms of the way Hollywood portrayed black people, there is one word in one line of the film that sends everything into full scale retrograde. It's Ilsa's first scene where she and her husband walk unawares into the club owned by her former lover Rick. She spots Sam who was with Rick and her in Paris. Trying to play it cool and not let on about what happened while her husband was away in a concentration camp, she says to Captain Renault in front of Victor, "Captain -- the boy who is playing the piano -- somewhere I have seen him."
Dooley Wilson was 56 when he played Sam, Ingrid Bergman who played Ilsa was 27.
It is the cringiest line of the movie and has been for at least six decades. No amount of explaining or putting it into the context of the era can change that.**
No one has ever accused Casablanca of being ahead of the curve as far as women are portrayed in the movies. By 1941, although it was the exception rather than the rule, Hollywood had given us a number of films featuring strong female characters in firm control of their destiny.*** Let's face it, Ilsa Lund, the spouse of Victor Laszlow, is no Yulia Navalnaya, the spouse of Alexei Navalny. After her husband's death, Navalnaya pledged to carry on her husband's work making herself not only persona-non-grata in her own country but also risking becoming a dead-woman-walking wherever she is as Putin's pathological fear of opposition and his homicidal impulses know of no national borders.
By contrast Ilsa, not long after learning erroneously of her husband's death, falls in love with Rick in Paris. Then to the consternation of a great many contemporary feminists, once reunited with her husband, AND her lover, she tells the latter that she can no longer stand being separated from him and leaves the decision of how to proceed up to him.
But for most feminists, far and away the most unsettling part of Casablanca is its treatment of the character of Captain Louis Renault.
If you were to take the most corrupt police official you have ever read about in the news, then multiply that person's malfeasance tenfold, you would still come up a bit short of Louis Renault.
The crazy, inexplicable and for many, unacceptable thing about him is that despite being a despicable individual, he is one of the most likable characters in the movie, he gets the funniest lines and in the end, becomes a hero to the cause, so to speak. Among the many unspeakable acts and outright crimes he commits while abusing his role as the Chief of Police of Casablanca, Renault routinely extorts women by offering highly coveted exit visas to them, in exchange for sex.
Casablanca was obviously made several decades before the women's movement gained momentum and several more decades before the advent of the MeToo Movement. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that while the attitudes about sexual harassment and the exploitation of women were different eighty years ago, there was no justification then or now for finding light in the actions of Renault, and that the filmmakers by making Renault a likable character despite his crimes are guilty of obfuscating and trivializing his actions.
I have a slightly different take on that last part, namely that the filmmakers did not cover up the actions of Renault in the slightest, but rather made them crystal clear and out in the open. It is we the viewers who through our fondness of the character over the decades, have overlooked his actions and trivialized them.
Let me explain.
The Spanish have a humorous expression: Mas lento como el caballo del malo, (Slower than a bad guy's horse). It refers to the predictable Hollywood Westerns of old, where characters were clearly defined, and the good guy always caught the bad guy because for some reason, the bad guy's horse was always slower.
In a widely referenced and decidedly not so silly essay despite its title: Casablanca, or, the Cliches are Having a Ball, philosopher Umberto Eco describes the film as a pastiche of several historical literary and dramatic themes, taken from works ranging from Homer to the most current popular entertainment of the time. According to him, set into those themes are characters who, like the Spanish idea of American Westerns, are "stock figures, either all good or all bad."
It's at this point in the essay where it appears that Eco and I had not been watching the same movie.****
From my point of view, there are only two characters in Casablanca who fit Eco's "stock figure" description. Representing the forces of good versus evil, in one corner is Victor Laszlo, the noble Resistance fighter risking life and limb to defend freedom and democracy. In the other corner, equally devoted to his cause of preserving, protecting and defending The Third Reich, is Major Strasser of the Gestapo.
In the end, just like the Westerns, the horse belonging to good guy dressed in white, Victor Laszlo, ended up being faster than Major Strasser's, as if by design.
As portrayed in the film, Victor Laszlo is an extraordinary person. I suppose in his one-dimensionality, so too is Major Strasser. The rest of the characters in the film are ordinary people doing their best to survive under extraordinary circumstances.
In other words, they're complicated.
I honestly can't name any character in Casablanca (with the exception of Major Strasser) who is all bad, but Captain Renault comes mighty close.
His trademark line "round up the usual suspects" defines Renault's approach to his job, that is to say throw as much shit against the wall to see what sticks. If nothing sticks, at least it looks like he's doing something.
Before we even meet him in the film, we witness one of those brutal round ups he speaks of, as officers under Renault's command terrorize the streets of Casablanca, capturing any character they deem suspicious looking. One unlucky soul is even shot dead in the back as he runs away from the thuggish cops. Renault may not himself be a Nazi, but without people like him, the Nazis would never had been able to wreak the amount of havok they did.
We don't see the death of Signor Urgate (Peter Lorre) while in the custody of Renault, we only hear the Captain mention his death while debating casually, as if he were deciding what to order for lunch, whether to report that Urgate committed suicide or was killed trying to escape.
And we never see Renault assaulting women, he only alludes to those actions with little more than a wink and a nudge.
What we do see is a prolonged scene with one of his prospective victims deeply searching her soul, pouring her heart out to Rick by contemplating what appears to be the only chance to get her and her husband out of Casablanca. Check out my last post which features both a video clip from, and the script of that scene.
Yet bad as he is, at the end of the film Louis Renault gets to walk arm and arm into the mist with the hero Rick in the last shot of the movie, redeemed by his sudden conversion into a patriot, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
All is forgiven and our sense of justice is thrown askew because Renault's horse turns out to be the swiftest of all, not quite as we think it should be.
Is it an injustice of the filmmakers to portray a scumbag such as Renault as a likeable character?
Well in the real world, bad guys' horses aren't always slow, despicable people sometimes can be quite charming when they're not doing despicable things, and in a time of war, combatants don't have the luxury of screening allies for their moral character. Remember, by the time Casablanca was released, Joseph Stalin was our ally.
No, I think given the two distinct sides of Louis Renault, it's up to viewer to decide. It's the kind of moral dilemma that Alfred Hitchcock, a master of telling stories with moral dilemmas, would be proud of. *****
If we end up liking Louis, it's on us, not the filmmakers.
Back when I was an impressionable youngster studying film, I pooh poohed Casablanca for its over-the-top sentimentality and its heavy-handed dialog, but especially because the film theorists whom I respected were dismissive if not outright hostile to it. In other words, it wasn't cool to like Casablanca.
But I got older and stopped caring so much about what other people told me to like. I grew to love the movie simply because it was so entertaining, especially the performances from the leads, to the greatest supporting cast ever put together in a motion picture, to the bit players who only have one line of dialog if that, to the of hundreds of extras, a great many of whom were themselves refugees from the Nazis. It's spectacularly beautiful to look at, thanks to the efforts of the director Michael Curtiz and the cinematographer Arthur Edison. And the screenplay despite its hiccups, gives us a story filled with characters we care about, not to mention all the great lines that have become woven into American culture.
It's a movie that stands up to multiple viewings as every time you see it, you pick up on details you missed before. By now I've probably seen Casablanca fifteen times and am still discovering new things, whether they be unnoticed comic gems, or clues that give heretofore unrealized insight into one of the characters. Some of those moments from my most recent viewing helped guide these two posts. It's a work of extreme economy, there's not one superfluous scene or even shot that is not essential to telling the story.
Mostly it stands the test of time.
That's especially true given the current state of the world. We've always had police corruption, sexism and racism, but I never thought I'd see the following again, especially in the United States:
- A return to pathological self-interest and isolationism as expressed by the term "America First."
- Indifference and outright hostility to the plight of the refugee.
- An acceptance of totalitarianism because of its apparent efficiency.
- Joseph Goebbels inspired "alternative facts" making a comeback.
- A criminal European dictator with absolute control and impunity being admired and embraced by a good many Americans including a former and possibly future president of the United States.
Before getting on that plane to Lisbon, Victor Laszlo's parting words to Rick are:
Welcome back to the fight, this time I know our side will win.
Watching Casablanca today and exploring it in the context of the time in which it was made as we just have, makes us realize we've been through all this before. Today our world is not in an altogether different place than it was in the late thirties/early forties. Because of that, in our own time we share something with the original viewers of the film more than eighty years ago:
Our story is still being written.
The best either of us could do is hope and pray that Victor Laszlo is right.
More than eighty years after it was made, Casablanca still has something to say to us.
We should listen.
Here's looking at you kid.
NOTES:
* Well, in the top one hundred films at least, in my humble opinion.
** That's not to say people haven't tried to explain that line away. One explanation is that in French, the official colonial language of Morocco, the archaic colloquial term for waiter is "garçon", in English, "boy". It might stand to reason that for folks of a particular social strata like Ilsa's, there would be no distinction between the workers in a nightclub, as they would all have been considered "the help". Consequentially, restaurant staff whether they be waiters or musicians might all be addressed in a similar fashion. In the words of a comment I read, it would be "a classist" form of addressing someone rather than a "racist" one.
I think the most logical explanation is the line was directly lifted from the play as were many others, and it simply didn't set off alarm bells in the minds of the screenwriters or anyone else involved, as it certainly would today. Regardless, the choice of Ilsa referring to Sam as "the boy" is a truly unfortunate, disrespectful one.
*** Three strong female characters immediately come to mind: Rosalind Russel's Hildy Johnson from Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, the eponymous role in Ernst Lubitich's Ninotchka .played by Greta Garbo, and much as Scarlet O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone with the Wind was not particularly admirable as a character, it would be hard to argue that she was not truly badass.
**** Umberto Eco over-plays his cliché card when he writes the following: "And so we can accept it ... when whores weep at the sound of “La Marseillaise.” The character he is referencing is Yvonne (Madelaine Lebeau). When we first meet her, she is at the bar at Rick's, obviously quite smitten by its proprietor and not a little tipsy. We can tell they've having a relationship or did, because he treats her shabbily. The next evening, Yvonne walks in with a German officer, obviously an attempt to get Rick's attention. Later that evening when the Germans start singing their patriotic tune Die Wacht am Rhein, Laszlo with Rick's approval, commands the house band to strike up the Marseillaise, and the voices of the rest of the patrons at Rick's singing along drown out the Germans. It's Yvonne's face we see in extreme closeup, tears in her eyes, singing the French national anthem more fervently than anyone in the room. When the tune finishes, she yells “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” That is her entire contribution to the movie. Did I mention that she was a prostitute? No, because there is no reason to believe she was, clichés be damned.
***** Ah but did the writers have the intention of setting up a moral dilemma for us, or was it just an accident? Did they simply assume viewers in 1942 wouldn't be bothered by Renault's actions? Let me point out one line that makes the answer pretty clear to me. When Rick first sets his eyes on young Annina, the Bulgarian girl set to be Louis' next conquest, the first thing Rick says to her is "Hey you're underage, how did you get in here?" Frankly I don't know how a typical 1942 audience would judge Louis coercing adult women to have sex with him. But extorting a child to have sex is another story. There was no reason to portray Annina as a minor other than to illustrate Loius Renault's depravity. The writers knew what they were doing.
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