The Story (continued)
Later
that night after the cafe has closed and the streets are deserted,
Rick despairs in his darkened establishment about Ilsa, chain-smoking
cigarettes and drinking bourbon heavily. Sam senses trouble and suggests
that his emotionally-numb
"Boss" go home to bed. Rick obstinately tells Sam that he's "waiting
for a lady" - expecting Ilsa to return to him. He agonizes over
her appearance:
"She's coming back, I know she's coming back." [With a curfew,
the airport beacon light combing the exterior, and the threats to Victor
Laszlo's life, it is unlikely that she would risk a late-night visit.]
Sam senses trouble and suggests that they "take the car and drive
all night" to avoid her in Casablanca, "get drunk," or "go
fishing and stay away until she's gone." Sam refuses to leave,
knowing Rick's deep depression as his employer associates Ilsa's appearance
after their affair to his own isolationism and to uncaring, neutral,
non-interventionist Americans who are "asleep" and unaware
of the rise of Fascism elsewhere - with its accompanying pain and lonely
agony:
They grab Ugarte. Then she walks in. Well, (that's)
the way it goes. One in, one out...(To Sam) It's December 1941
in Casablanca. [This is a retrospective warning about Pearl Harbor]
What time is it in New York?...I bet they're asleep in New York.
I bet they're asleep all over America.
Distraught over past painful memories being re-activated,
he pounds his fist down on the table:
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all
the world, she walks into mine.
Rick angrily orders a repeat performance from Sam at
the piano of As Time Goes By:
Rick: What's that you're playin?
Sam: Oh, just a little somethin' on my own.
Rick: Well, stop it! You know what I want to hear.
Sam: No, I don't.
Rick: You played it for her, you can play it for me.
Sam: Well, I don't think I can remember...
Rick: If she can stand it, I can. Play it!
As variations of As Time Goes By play, the camera
blurs into a dissolve from his face into a flashback - it takes him
back to memories of happier times in a whirlwind romance with Ilsa
in pre-Occupation Paris where they were in love before the German
invasion. It is a bittersweet account of their ill-fated time together.
He revisits the past to resist the explanation that he knows she
will bring for her betrayal of him in Paris. He is still in love
with her and feeling rejection after she abandoned him, her beloved,
in Paris without explanation.
In an open car, the in-love couple motor through the
city by the Arche de Triomphe and down the Champs Elysee, and then
into the French countryside. They also take a boat down the Seine
River with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. In Ilsa's Parisian hotel,
Rick pops a champagne cork and they sip champagne while vowing never
to ask about their pasts:
Rick: Who are you really and what were you before?
What did you do and what did you think, huh?
Ilsa: We said no questions.
When they toast each other and clink their glasses,
Rick utters his classic line for the first time:
Here's looking at you, kid.
Under a glittering, rotating mirrored ball, they dance
in a Paris nightclub. [The tune Perfidia plays in the background
- a Mexican song about love and betrayal, with music and lyrics by
Milton Leeds and Alberto Domínguez.] Afterwards, an unattached
Ilsa tosses a coin in the air and admits that her former lover [Victor
Laszlo] is thought to be dead:
Ilsa: A franc for your thoughts.
Rick: In America, they bring only a penny. I guess that's about all
they're worth.
Ilsa: But, I'm willing to be overcharged. Tell me.
Rick: And I was wondering...
Ilsa: Yes.
Rick: Why I'm so lucky, why I should find you waiting for me to come
along?
Ilsa: Why there is no other man in my life?
Rick: Uh, huh.
Ilsa: That's easy. There was. And he's dead.
Rick: I'm sorry for asking. I forgot we said no questions.
Ilsa: Well, only one answer can take care of all our questions. (She
approaches his lips for a kiss.)
But the Germans begin their devastating advance on
Paris and intrude upon their love affair. Quick cuts show documentary
newsfilm of the Nazi encroachment/Anschluss with troops, tanks
and planes during their love affair. On June 11, 1940, in an outdoor,
street-side cafe, the Cafe Pierre in the Montmartre district
of Paris, Rick purchases a newspaper, the Paris-soir and the
lovers read of the news of the Nazis' approach:
Paris Ville Ouverte: Ordre D'Evacuation
Avis a la Population
Lache Agression - L'Italie nous Declare La Guerre
[Paris is an Open City: The Population is Advised
to Evacuate. The Cowardly Aggression (German advance) - Italy Declares
War on Us.]
They hear a report from a truck with mounted loudspeakers
of the fast-breaking news and Rick knows it is time for him to get
out of town. They discuss the jeopardy he is in - as an anti-Fascist
- that has already earned him the wrath of the Gestapo for his "record":
Rick: Nothing can stop them now. Wednesday [June
12, 1940], Thursday [June 13, 1940], at the latest, they'll be
in Paris. [The Germans actually entered Paris on Friday,
June 14, 1940.]
Ilsa (frightened): Richard, they'll find out your record. It won't
be safe for you here.
Rick (smiles): I'm on their blacklist already, their roll of honor.
At La Belle Aurore in Paris, Sam plays As
Time Goes By as Rick pours a glass of champagne for Ilsa: "Henri
[the proprietor] wants us to finish this bottle, and then three
more. He says he'll water his garden with champagne before he'll
let the Germans drink it." The drinks "take the sting
out of being occupied" for a short moment. Rick then offers
his familiar toast: "Here's looking at you, kid." Gestapo
loudspeakers in the street interrupt them, announcing the German's
arrival the next day. At the window, Ilsa suffers in despair at
the news:
Ilsa: They're telling us how to act when they come
marching in. With the whole world crumbling we pick this time to
fall in love.
Rick: Yeah, it's pretty bad timing. Where were you, say, ten years
ago?
Ilsa: Ten years ago? Let's see, yes, I was having a brace put on
my teeth. Where were you?
Rick: Looking for a job.
As they embrace and kiss at the open window, artillery
fire is heard off in the distance. Ilsa is startled:
Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?
Based upon his past familiarity with gun-running and
arms-dealing, Rick knows exactly what caliber of artillery and the
distance away it is being fired: "Ah, that's the new German
77, and judging by the sound, only about thirty-five miles away -
and getting closer every minute." Because there is a "price" on
Rick's head and his life is in danger, Ilsa pleads with him to leave
Paris. Rick suggests that they flee together on the 5 o'clock
train from Paris to Marseilles ahead of the German invaders. She
promises to meet him at the station - and then Rick nonchalantly
proposes getting married in Marseilles, but Ilsa thinks that's rushing
it: "That's too far ahead to plan." Rick jokes that the
engineer could marry them on the train. She is emotionally
overwhelmed by his request and expresses her love for him in the
midst of the "crazy world":
I love you so much. And I hate this war so much.
Oh, it's a crazy world. Anything can happen. If you shouldn't get
away, I mean, if something should keep us apart, wherever they
put you and wherever I'll be, I want you to know that...
They express their passionate feelings in the flashback
scene's climax. An emotionally-intoxicated Ilsa initiates the kiss,
moving up to meet Rick's lips as they sit together, abandoning herself
to him in a kiss - specially requested:
Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.
The camera moves to reveal that Ilsa's fist has dropped
and tipped over her champagne glass - symbolizing the strength of
her anger at fate - and the end of her happy times with Rick. The
onset of World War II is brilliantly juxtaposed with the split in
their personal relationship.
The flashback dissolves to the crowded Paris train
station before their planned flight to Marseilles, where Rick waits
for Ilsa at four minutes to five. Sam delivers a cryptic note of
farewell that Ilsa left for him after she checked out of her hotel.
Raindrops, like tears, spatter and smear Ilsa's parting words in
the rain-drenched, blurry farewell note to him:
Richard,
I cannot
go with you or ever
see you again. You
must not ask why.
Just believe that I
love you. Go, my darling,
and God bless you.
Ilsa
Sam forcibly pushes a devastated Rick onto the departing
train, propelling him away from danger and from his aborted love
affair with the woman he idolized. Rick crumples the fateful letter
and tosses it down as the train pulls away. [From there, Rick went
on to Casablanca, with Sam, where he established an American-style
nightclub and became its saloonkeeper in 18 month's time.]
At the end of his reminiscing, the camera pans from
left to right, locating a drunken, dozing Rick sitting at a cafe
table in the right foreground and knocking over his glass of bourbon.
The camera repositions him on the left when suddenly, the door to
the closed cafe opens, seen in the far distance in the middle of
the screen. The lighting in the next black-and-white image is stunningly
effective. There, spotlighted in a shaft of light (almost as if in
Rick's dream or memory), Ilsa appears wearing a white coat and scarf.
As he expected, she has come to him, but she heightens his resentful
feelings by telling him that she wouldn't have come if she had known
he was in Casablanca. She approaches and attempts to speak to him,
but he is sarcastic and refuses to listen to her explanations or
her sympathy. His morbid self-pitying and bitterness is too great
to allow him to listen. Rick wallows unresponsively:
Rick: Why did you have to come to Casablanca? There
are other places.
Ilsa: I wouldn't have come if I'd known that you were here.
Believe me, Rick. It's true. I didn't know.
Rick: It's funny about your voice how it hasn't changed. I can still
hear it: 'Richard dear. I'll go with you anyplace. We'll get on a
train together and never stop.'
Ilsa: Please don't. Don't Rick! I can understand how you feel.
Rick: Huh! You understand how I feel. How long was it we had, honey?
Ilsa: I didn't count the days.
Rick: Well I did. Every one of them. Mostly, I remember the last
one. The wow finish. A guy standing on a station platform in the
rain with a comical look on his face, because his insides had been
kicked out.
Ilsa: Can I tell you a story, Rick?
Rick: Does it got a wow finish?
Ilsa: I don't know the finish yet.
Rick: Go on and tell it. Maybe one will come to you as you go along.
With tears in her eyes, Ilsa attempts to explain her
past history - something she had kept from him earlier. She was just
a young girl new to Paris from her Norwegian home in Oslo when at
the house of some friends, she met a "very great and courageous
man. He opened up for her a whole beautiful world full of knowledge
and thoughts and ideals." He was an idealistic man whom she
worshipped as an heroic father figure - with infatuation that she
interpreted as love ("...she looked up to him, worshipped him,
with a feeling she supposed was love"). But Rick's anger and
rude sarcasm halts her, and blocks her from continuing. He denigrates
his once, dearly-beloved girlfriend to the level of a promiscuous
and loose slut:
Yes, it's very pretty. I heard a story once. As a
matter of fact, I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went
along with the sound of a tinny piano, playing in the parlor downstairs.
'Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid,' they'd always begin.
Well, I guess neither one of our stories is very funny. Tell me,
who was it you left me for? Was it Laszlo or were there others
in between? Or aren't you the kind that tells?
Ilsa, with a tear running down her cheek and without
a further word, leaves Rick slumped down and collapsed on the table
with his head in his hands.
The next morning at the Prefet's de Police's office
[Wednesday, Dec. 3, 1940], the suspicious Strasser and fence-straddling
Capitaine Renault discuss Rick's connection to Ugarte:
Strasser: I strongly suspect that Ugarte left the
letters of transit with Mr. Blaine. I would suggest you search
the cafe immediately and thoroughly.
Renault: If Rick has the letters, he's much too smart to let you
find them there.
Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My impression
was that he's just another blundering American.
Renault: But we mustn't underestimate American blundering. (Innocently)
I was with them when they 'blundered' into Berlin in 1918. [The date
should more accurately be 1919.] (Strasser nonchalantly coughs at
the thought.)
When Victor and Ilsa arrive, Strasser tells Victor, "an
escaped prisoner of the Reich," that he will definitely not
receive an exit visa out of Casablanca. Strasser attempts to intimidate
the defiant, elusive resistance leader: "So far, you have been
fortunate enough in eluding us. You have reached Casablanca - it
is my duty to see that you stay in Casablanca." Laszlo doesn't
intimidate easily: "Whether or not you will succeed is, of course,
problematical."
Strasser offers them another option that would allow
the two of them to leave for Lisbon the next day - all Victor has
to do is to betray the names of his fellow Underground Resistance
leaders throughout Europe and "you will have your visa in the
morning." Amused, Renault contemptuously utters the next line: "And
the honor of having served the Third Reich!" Laszlo eloquently
denounces the Major and refuses to be bribed by the preposterous
offer. He is arrogantly unafraid of Nazi threats:
If I didn't give them to you in a concentration camp,
where you had more persuasive methods at your disposal, I certainly
won't give them to you now. And what if you track down these men
and kill them? What if you murdered all of us? From every corner
of your Republic, thousands would rise to take our places. Even
Nazis can't kill that fast.
Threateningly, Strasser informs Laszlo that no one
could take his place
"in the event anything unfortunate should occur to you." Strasser
adds that Ugarte is dead - and Renault admits that there was foul play
involved: "I'm making out the report now. We haven't quite decided
whether he committed suicide or died trying to escape." After
the two have left ("undoubtedly...to the black market" to
obtain a visa), another "visa problem" is presented to Renault
- the police chief straightens his tie and responds: "Show her
in."
Rick visits the Blue Parrot Cafe, so that Major
Strasser has a "chance to ransack my place." There, he
meets with Senor Ferrari, a dealer in black market items ("He
pretty near has a monopoly on the Black Market"). Ferrari is
seen escorting a couple out of his office [in a subplot involving
an attractive Bulgarian refugee named Annina and her husband], suggesting
to them that they see Capitaine Renault. With small beady eyes emphasizing
his cynical craftiness, Ferrari suspects that the late Ugarte left
the valuable exit visas with Rick and offers to help Rick unload
them at a profit:
Ferrari: There's something I want to talk over with
you, anyhow. (He hails a waiter) The bourbon. Ah. The news about
Ugarte upsets me very much.
Rick: You're a fat hypocrite. You don't feel any sorrier for Ugarte
than I do.
Ferrari: Of course not. What upsets me is the fact that Ugarte is
dead and no one knows where those letters of transit are.
Rick: Practically no one.
Rick learns the real value of the letters of transit
from their conversation - he claims that he's a "poor businessman" who
needs them more than Ferrari, plays ignorant about their whereabouts,
and refuses to deal (and be a "partner"). As Rick leaves,
he passes Victor who is on his way in to meet with the corrupt marketeer,
pointing out: "Senor Ferrari's the fat gent at the table." In
the market bazaar outside the cafe, Rick encounters Ilsa who is shopping-bargaining
for fabric while Victor is in the Blue Parrot. He apologizes for
his drunken denunciation of her unfaithfulness the previous night,
but she coldly rejects his explanation this time (Her statement toward
the bazaar keeper "I'm not interested" could easily have
been directed toward Rick). He blames his confusion on the 'bore-bun'
he was drinking: "Your story had me a little confused...Why
did you come back? To tell me why you ran out on me at the railway
station?"
Although he is sober, Ilsa doesn't wish to explain her behavior, because
she sees how he has changed. It will be better for her to leave Casablanca
and never see him again:
Last night, I saw what has happened to you. The Rick
I knew in Paris I could tell him, he'd understand. But the one
who looked at me with such hatred - I'll be leaving Casablanca
soon and we'll never see each other again. We knew very little
about each other when we were in love in Paris. If we leave it
that way, maybe we'll remember those days and not Casablanca. Not
last night.
Although she adamantly wants to put their entire relationship
behind her, he tells her to visit him again at his apartment above
the saloon, now that he's "not running away," "settled," and
awaiting her return. He expects her to lie to Laszlo as she lied
to him:
Walk up a flight. I'll be expecting you. All the
same, someday you'll lie to Laszlo - you'll be there.
But then she reveals the well-kept secret that Victor
was her husband all along, even in Paris: "No, Rick. No, you
see, Victor Laszlo's my husband and was, even when I knew you in
Paris." Abruptly, Ilsa walks away from a subdued, speechless
and stunned Rick. It is his first knowledge that she was married
during their aborted affair in Paris [She was apparently unfaithful,
although she sincerely believed that her 'husband' was dead].
Victor and Ilsa helplessly ask for assistance from
Senor Ferrari in leaving Casablanca. With wide and innocent eyes
this time, he tells them that Ilsa will be the only one able to leave
and he may be able to help smuggle her out.
As leader of all the illegal activities in Casablanca,
I'm an influential and respected man, but it would not be worth
my life to do anything for Monsieur Laszlo. You, however,
are a different matter.
During their conversation, Victor's goal changes to
one of acquiring an exit visa for Ilsa, not for himself, and Ilsa
responds that she is uncertain about abandoning him: "You mean
for me to go on alone?" Word has gotten around that it is too
risky to find an exit visa for Victor, because frankly, "it
would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca, and the Germans
have outlawed miracles." They decide that Ilsa will not go alone
ahead of Victor to America (because he never abandoned her in the
past), and that they will continue searching for two exit visas.
As they part and thank Ferrari for his time, Ferrari
is "moved" (altruistically) to shrewdly suggest that Ugarte
left the stolen letters of transit with Rick:
I observe that you are in one respect a very fortunate
man, Monsieur. I am moved to make one more suggestion, why, I do
not know, because it cannot possibly profit me. Have you heard
about Senor Ugarte and the letters of transit?...Those letters
were not found on Ugarte when they arrested him...I'd venture to
guess that Ugarte left those letters with Monsieur Rick...He's
a difficult customer, that Rick. One never knows what he'll do
or why, but it is worth a chance.
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