The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Michael Curtiz · a film · 1942 · about 102 minutes · screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch, from the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
Mode
Studio melodrama and wartime intrigue picture fused into one plot; a stage play’s unity of place brought to the screen
Mythos
The wounded king, withheld in his small kingdom at the edge of the world, drawn back by the return of what wounded him; the neutral who chooses a side
Phase
A few days and nights in December 1941, from a round-up in the streets to an aircraft leaving in fog, with one long return in memory to Paris before the Germans came
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, academy ratio, in English, about 102 minutes, in one version; shot on the Warner Bros. stages and lot at Burbank, the airport on a stage
Register
Romantic, rueful and quick; a comedy of corruption beside the tragedy of the war, slatted shadow, a searchlight, and two anthems in one room
Scale
One café, one city of waiting, the war at its door
Governing Proposition
In a port where refugees wait to buy their way out of Europe, an American who keeps a café and takes no side is handed the two things that can move him: papers that open the way out, and the woman who left him in Paris. The wager of the film is that a private wound and a public war can be settled in one choice, that a city of refugees can be shown as one room where safety is a market, and that the hero’s good is measured by what he will not sell.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a globe and a narrator. A route is traced across it from Paris to Lisbon by way of Casablanca, the road by which refugees from occupied Europe try to reach the Americas, and at Casablanca the road stops and they wait. Two German couriers have been killed and the letters of transit they carried taken, and the police make a round-up in the streets. Before any principal character has spoken, the city has been shown as a waiting room on a refugee trail, under Vichy, in December 1941.
The waiting room has one centre. Rick’s Café Américain is a bar, a gaming room and a stage with a piano, and everyone who wants something in Casablanca passes through it. The camera moves through the room at Rick’s introduction and gives its whole geography in one passage: the tables, the refugees making deals, a pickpocket at work among the tourists, an elderly couple practising their English, the croupier at the wheel. At the end of the passage is Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, in a white dinner jacket, alone with a chess problem. He takes no side. The café is his kingdom, small and at the edge of the world, and he keeps himself out of it.
Michael Curtiz directed the film for Warner Bros., produced by Hal B. Wallis, from a screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch after Everybody Comes to Rick’s, an unproduced play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. Arthur Edeson photographed it in black and white, Owen Marks edited it, and Max Steiner wrote the score, built around Herman Hupfeld’s song “As Time Goes By” of 1931. Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson play beside Bogart. It was shot almost entirely on the Burbank stages and lot, premiered in New York on 26 November 1942 and went into general release on 23 January 1943. It runs about 102 minutes, in one version. At the ceremony of March 1944 it won the Academy Awards for Picture, Director and Screenplay.
Movement II
On the first night Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre, a small trader in exit papers, brings Rick the stolen letters of transit to keep for him, and Rick hides them in Sam’s piano. Major Strasser, played by Conrad Veidt, has arrived in the city, and Captain Renault, the prefect of police, played by Claude Rains, has Ugarte arrested in the café, in front of the customers. Rick does not lift a hand. The papers that can take anyone out of Casablanca are now in the one place no one thinks to look.
Then Victor Laszlo, a leader of the resistance, played by Paul Henreid, comes into the café with Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman. Ilsa knows Sam, played by Dooley Wilson, and asks him for the old song. She says, “Play it, Sam”, and he does, and Rick comes across the room to stop him and sees her. The film turns in that phrase. A story of papers and police becomes a story of a man and the woman he lost, and the papers become the price of her leaving.
After closing Rick sits drinking, and the film goes back to Paris. The affair is shown in its happiness, a drive through the city, champagne, the Germans coming nearer; then the Germans enter, and Rick waits for Ilsa at the station in the rain. She does not come. Sam brings her note, and the rain runs the ink. The flashback is the film’s one long break from Casablanca and its softest passage, written below the rest and with its drive done in back projection, but it gives Ilsa’s leaving a cause the audience has seen, and it places the wound at the centre of the film, inside Rick’s drunken night.
Movement III
The second day is a market. Ilsa comes to Rick and he is bitter with her. Laszlo needs the letters of transit, and at the Blue Parrot Ferrari, played by Sydney Greenstreet, who sells everything, tells him who has them. Renault prices visas. Every person in the city is trying to buy something, and every person in a position to sell is selling. Rick’s café is the exchange, and Rick is the one trader who will not name his price.
Annina and Jan, a young Bulgarian couple, need visas they cannot pay for. Renault has offered Annina hers on terms she is to pay with her body, and she comes to Rick to ask whether a man like Renault keeps his word. In the gaming room Jan is losing what little they have. Rick tells him to play twenty-two, and twenty-two comes up, and again. The couple have their money, and the house has lost it on Rick’s word.
It is the first time Rick acts, and he acts without a word about why. The scene is small and rehearses the ending at small scale: a man who claims to stick by no one gives up something of his own so that a couple can leave together. The law of the whole film is set out at the roulette table. Safety is bought, virtue is one of the currencies, and the question each person must answer is what they will not sell.
Movement IV
German officers gather at the piano and sing “Die Wacht am Rhein”. Laszlo goes to the band and orders the “Marseillaise”; the bandleader looks to Rick, and Rick nods. The band plays, the café stands and sings, and the German song is drowned. Yvonne, a woman Rick has discarded, sings with tears on her face. Many of the players in that room had fled Nazism themselves, and the film’s height is a room answering another room’s anthem. Few studio films have equalled it.
Strasser has the café closed. Renault declares himself shocked to find gambling in the café, and is handed his winnings by the croupier as he says it. The farce and the threat are the same act, and the film plays them together: corruption is comic and it is also the instrument of the police state. The café that was Rick’s refusal to choose has been closed by the side he would not oppose.
That night Ilsa comes to Rick’s rooms for the letters and holds a gun on him, and cannot use it. She tells him why she left Paris, and the wound of the flashback is given its cause. A searchlight crosses the rooms. Then Laszlo is arrested at the café, in a trap Rick has arranged with Renault so that he will be taken with the letters, and the trap is reversed: Rick turns a gun on Renault, and the way to the airport is open.
Movement V
The airport is a stage set in fog. An aircraft, flat and visible as a cut-out, waits for the Lisbon flight, and an engine turns over in the dark. The letters are made out for Laszlo and Ilsa. He tells her she is going with her husband, and he says aloud what the film means: that the problems of three people do not amount to “a hill of beans” in the world as it is. The private choice and the public one are made in one sentence. The film lets the man say its moral rather than leave it to be found.
Strasser arrives and Rick shoots him. Renault, with the police coming, has to choose, and he chooses Rick: he tells them to look elsewhere. Then he picks up a bottle of Vichy water, looks at it, and drops it in a basket. The gesture is the whole of Renault’s conversion, done in the particulars of his trade and his comedy.
The aircraft leaves. Rick and Renault walk together into the fog, two men in place of the lovers, a friendship where a marriage would have ended a romance. The American who would not take a side in December 1941 has taken one, at the cost of the woman he loved, and the corrupt official has taken it beside him. Their last scene changes the meaning of what they have said to each other before, and the film ends on them.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. Run the subtractive test and most of the film resists it. The prologue makes the city a waiting room on a refugee trail before anyone speaks. The letters of transit are the one object that turns a love story into a choice about the war. Ugarte, Strasser, Ferrari and Renault are each required for a different price of passage: theft, force, trade and corruption. The Bulgarian couple are required, since the roulette is the scene where Rick first acts and rehearses the ending at small scale, and the flashback gives Ilsa’s leaving a cause the audience has seen. The give is in the margins: the elderly couple practising English, the pickpocket’s refrain, Sascha’s kisses and some of Carl’s business are pleasures of the studio ensemble, not parts the argument needs.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: neutrality is a wound dressed as a principle, and private grievance becomes public commitment only at the cost of the private good. Beneath it lies a harder, social truth, handled with real precision: in a city of refugees, safety is a market, and virtue is one of its currencies. Annina is asked to buy her husband’s exit with her body; Renault prices visas; Ferrari sells everything; the café is the exchange. What holds the figure is the film’s own voice. It states its moral aloud, its politics are those of a wartime picture made to put America in the war, and Laszlo is a principle rather than a man, so the cost of commitment is told more than disclosed. Much of what the film is loved for is mood, romantic and rueful, not meaning.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The film rises more than once and reaches one true summit. When German officers sing “Die Wacht am Rhein” and the café’s band answers with the “Marseillaise”, on Laszlo’s order and Rick’s nod, with Yvonne in tears, the room becomes a collective elevation few studio films equal, its force increased by a cast many of whom had fled Nazism. The song’s entrance at Sam’s piano turns the film in a phrase. The airport, fog and searchlight and an engine turning over, lifts by restraint. What holds the figure is height and frequency together. The Paris flashback is the low point, its romance conventional and its dialogue soft; and the elevation is warm and recurrent but never terrible, its height coming from feeling more than from the image.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears the plot. The ruler of a small kingdom at the edge of the world, wounded in love, withholds himself, and is drawn back into the world by the return of what wounded him: the wounded king and his healing, in a white dinner jacket. The letters of transit are a passage out of a limbo of waiting, and the café is its gate. Under the personal myth lies a national one, load-bearing and dated to the month: an American expatriate in December 1941, with a past of gun-running and Spain, who will not take sides and chooses one at the airport. The particular stays particular: a piano, a chess problem, champagne. Held below the gate because the figures are drawn in clean strokes and the allegory is schematic, closer to fable than to a myth worked through.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the studio melodrama and the wartime intrigue picture, with Algiers (1938) on the same North African ground, a stage play’s unity of place, and the house style of Warner Bros. at its height. The departures are small: lovers who part by the hero’s choice, a cynic converted without being punished or killed, a closing friendship in place of a marriage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake, scored with the turn. This was an A picture from the most efficient studio in Hollywood, made by a contract director with contract and loan-out stars, on a path every element of which was proven, and its one wager, the ending, was a studio’s decision about a property. It is the system working at its best, which is credited elsewhere; it is not a swerve. Shadow of a Doubt, on a more personal wager, stands at 7.3.
Score: 6.9 / 10
The form carries knowledge in two places. The confinement to one café makes a world in transit visible as one room, through which everyone must pass and where every transaction is watched. The placing of the flashback at the centre, inside Rick’s drunken night, makes memory the wound the present must close. The airport, the one exterior of weight, is a stage set in fog, so the departure is a passage out of the film’s world as well as the city’s. What holds the figure is that the form is the play’s form: much of what the work knows would survive in a well-made stage version, and the film’s own means, Edeson’s light, Steiner’s quotation of the anthems, the camera moving through the room, intensify rather than constitute what it knows.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Eighty-four years of return are evidence, and the return is real, but it is more of pleasure than of meaning. The film has yielded a production history and readings of its politics of intervention, of Renault’s corruption and charm, and of Ilsa’s divided loyalty. Its semantic depth lies mostly in Rick and Renault, whose last scene changes the meaning of what the two men have said to each other before. Its formal depth is limited: the lighting and the staging reward study, but the structure is plain on first viewing and stays plain. The film is re-seen more than re-read. That is evidence of survival, credited under The Imperishable, more than of a well without a floor.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Released in 1942, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is modest: the film reorganised nothing in what film could do. It brought the studio picture’s existing means to a rare finish and fused romance and war propaganda into one plot. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reluctant idealist became Bogart’s persona, taken up at once in To Have and Have Not (1944) and Passage to Marseille (1944); the romance resolved by sacrifice to the cause became a template for the war picture; homage and pastiche followed, Play It Again, Sam (1972) above all, and lines passed into common speech. The reach is wide but shallow in what it redirected: it lies in culture’s memory more than in the field’s practice, and filmmakers quote it more than they work differently because of it. Fame and box office lend nothing here.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-four years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and its restorations are repair. The colorized version made for Turner in 1988 was a variant added beside it and replaced nothing; the black-and-white film has remained the one exhibited, so the charge is nil. Presence has been continuous and as wide as any film’s: repertory revivals on a scale few films have known, television, every home format, teaching, and a reach beyond the cinema in its song and its lines. The surface is fixed to its moment, Vichy, the Free French, December 1941, but it ages as history, since the film is about that moment. The fabric, studio photography of its period, is the smallest charge.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making is of the highest studio order: a screenplay in which line after line carries character and plot at once; Arthur Edeson’s light, the slatted shadows, the searchlight crossing Rick’s rooms; Curtiz’s camera moving through the café at Rick’s introduction, giving a crowded room’s geography in one passage; Max Steiner’s score, setting the anthems against each other and working the song into every turn; Bogart, Bergman and Rains exact, and a supporting company without a weak face. The costs: the back projection of the Paris drive, the cut-out aircraft at the airport, Henreid’s Laszlo stiff where the script gives him only rectitude, and a flashback written below the rest. The command is continuous, and the image rarely carries what the words do not.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the pickpocket working the tourists at the café’s tables, and the aircraft leaving in fog. One law covers them: everything in Casablanca is a transaction, and the question is what a person will not sell. It holds from the croupier’s winnings to Rick’s last choice. The tonal range is wide, from Renault’s farce of shock to Laszlo’s arrest, and the film holds it, since the comedy of corruption and the tragedy of the war obey the same price. The ending’s turns are seeded and hold on return. The break is in the middle. The Paris flashback runs on another law, that of the screen romance, in a softer register than the rest, and for its length the price that governs everything else is suspended.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 102 minutes holds, and it holds more orders than its length suggests, through one room: a love affair; a friendship between two men; the economy of a refugee port; the police state and its collaborators; the war in Europe; the American decision to enter it; and, at the edge, the question of what one person owes the many. They are held, not listed: the private choice at the airport is the political one. What holds the figure is that the orders are sketched rather than inhabited. The refugees are a chorus, Morocco itself is decor, and the war is known only through one café’s door. A small form, and the figure describes it.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Made at 8.5 and The Inevitable at 8.3. A film that survives whole in its one version, with a presence as wide as any film’s; a making of the highest studio order, in screenplay, light, score and players; and a structure in which almost every part is a price of passage out of one city.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 6.9: an A picture on a proven path, from the most efficient studio of its day, whose one wager was a studio’s decision about an ending. Above it, The Encompassed at 7.5, where the refugees are a chorus and the war is known through one café’s door, and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6, a reach wide in culture’s memory and shallow in what it redirected. They are one fact: the film is the studio system at its finest, not a work that changed it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.2, The Living Form at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, The Unconcealment at 7.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Swerve at 6.9 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 6.9, below 7.5; every other axis it covers stands at 7.6 or above. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 95.6, an average of 7.97 that displays 8.0: the work stands in the band of Tier IV, at its threshold, and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Casablanca as released, premiered in New York on 26 November 1942 and in general release from 23 January 1943, in its one version, about 102 minutes, black and white, academy ratio, in English, from the globe of the prologue to the walk into the fog: directed by Michael Curtiz for Warner Bros., produced by Hal B. Wallis, from a screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch after the unproduced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, photographed by Arthur Edeson, edited by Owen Marks, with music by Max Steiner and the song “As Time Goes By” by Herman Hupfeld. The colorized version made for Turner in 1988 is a later variant, not the work, and is weighed only as part of the film’s survival. No print, script or recording was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and otherwise described. Accounts of how the film was written and when its ending was settled are not the object, and claims about them that could not be verified are not given; nor are the scene timings, the standard histories and essays on the film, or the particulars of the signature on the letters of transit.