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A wartime romantic movie, considered by many to be one of the most romantic (and best) movies ever made.
The setting is Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941; the city is a melting-pot hotbed of refugees from Nazi oppression who are all desperately trying to make their way to the United States -- and freedom -- while trying to avoid the Vichy French authorities, their German masters, and opportunistic criminals. At the center of the story is protagonist Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), the bitter, cynical American owner of Rick's Café Americain -- which professes absolute neutrality to all, from the ruthless German commander Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) and the corrupt, cynical French police chief Louis Renault ([[Claude Rains]]) to the desperate refugees and criminals who use his bar as a convenient place for dealings of all kinds.
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* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: Rick lets Ilsa leave with Victor and is forced to leave Casablanca for his role in the pair's escape. On the bright side, Victor and Ilsa are able to get away from Casablanca to continue to lead the fight against the Nazis for the resistance, and Rick has his sense of idealism revived.
* [[Black Best Friend]]: Sam is a prototypical example.
* [[Born Lucky]]: The opening night was just at the time of the very successful Operation Torch, which took place at...Casablanca.
* [[Bowdlerise]]d: The first German dub was so thoroughly denazified (by about 25 minutes) that it told a completely different story. It took them 23 years to make a faithful dub.
** To this day, any reference to fascism or Italy is missing from the Italian version.
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* [[Even Evil Has Standards]]: While Captain Renault is willing to extort sex out of women desperate to get out of Casablanca, if they find another way to buy a ticket he won't change up on them and stop them from leaving.
**Renault lampshades this by telling Rick he may be the only one more unscrupulous then himself.
***At that time specifically Rick is trying to convince Renault that he would be willing to betray Lazlo and have him shipped to a concentration camp just to make sure he can run off with his wife. Apparently that reaches beyond even Renault's [[Moral Event Horizon]].
* [[Evil Cannot Comprehend Good]]: Averted. Major Strasser's the first person to guess Rick's idealism isn't quite dead.
* [[Film Noir]]: Heavy shadows, morally conflicted and deeply wounded cynical protagonist, [[Bittersweet Ending]], [[Humphrey Bogart]]... yeah, it counts.
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** When Ilsa meets a drunken Rick after the bar is closed, his line about a 'tinny piano' is subtly referencing a brothel, implying she is a prostitute.
**Hello! Renault is a serial rapist or uses his official power as a means of intimidation so flippantly that he is the next thing to one.
**Rick had good reason for kicking the President of the Deutsche Bank out of his back room gaming hall; he wasn't just German or just a banker, he was probably a profiteer mooching on anti-Jewish laws which meant effectively he had been robbing Rick's customers. Even people who stick their neck out for no one might take it ill.
* [[Good Cannot Comprehend Evil]]: When Victor tells Strasser "Even Germans can't kill that fast."
* [[Good Guy Bar]]: ''Rick's Cafe Americain''.
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* [[Iconic Song Request]]: "Play it, Sam. Play ''As Time Goes By''."
* Irony: a mildly heavy-handed one at the beginning where a fleeing suspect for political crimes is shot by Vichy police under the doorstep of the "Palais de Justice"(palace of justice).
**Perhaps the most famous song ("As Time Goes By") is in a movie whose defining plot is about a world distinctly unwelcoming to lovers.
* [[I Want My Beloved to Be Happy]]: A defining theme of the movie. Although this is justified more than the trope typically is. "If that plane takes off and you're not on it, you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life." Also, he was talking about the work Laszlo was doing more than just being with him.
** Not just Rick, though. Both of them care more about her safety and happiness than which of them "wins".
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***It's still a bad thing. Let's just say, normal human sleaze [[Even Evil Has Standards|isn't as bad as]] a nightmare [[Religion of Evil|ideology]] determined to commit genocide.
* [[Knight in Sour Armor]]: Rick, again. [[Love Redeems|He gets better]].
**He is not all that bad in any case. He has the minimal if not spectacular decency to make sure Yvonne is not compromised when drunk and more to his credit he intervenes when a refugee's wife is being extorted by Renault. He may not have intervened when an arrest was made in his tavern, but at least some of the people that Renault arrested deserved it. And nightclub owners are not in the business of second-guessing police unless they are on a jury.
* [[Lady of War]]: [[Ingrid Bergman]] seems to be a [[Damsel in Distress]] trying to be a [[Lady of War]]. More important, what she really is, is every soldier's favorite princess. Which might make this a successful attempt at inspiring the world war II version of [[Courtly Love]] from fans.
* [[Laughably Evil]]: Some of the best examples of this, with "round up the usual suspects", "We have not decided whether he committed suicide or was shot trying to escape",and "I told them to be especially destructive, you know how that impresses Germans".
* [[Leitmotif]]: Three:
** Most famously, "As Time Goes By", which symbolizes the romance between Rick and Ilsa.
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** The fact that he says this directly to his Nazi superior officer makes it even more ballsy.
*** Louis is in fact all cool with his normally extremely controversial behavior of opportunism. He, for instance, at one point nonchalantly informs Rick that he will go to his Nazi Superior to lick ass for his own sake.
* [[Loved I Not Honor More]]: Because "the problems of three little people don't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world..."
* [[MacGuffin]]: The letters of transit, which are fictional. And don't make sense. While never actually being used... since before the plane left, Strasser was dead and Renault was sympathetic... which also means Rick could have gotten on the plane along with Ilsa and Laszlo. And who the heck cares anyway?
** The people at the other end of the plane's flight would care. Which was Lisbon, not exactly a safe haven. (It may have been Portugal, but if the German government made enough of a stink of things then the Lisbon authorities could have arrested everyone there.)
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* [[Shown Their Work]]: About drink on at least one instance. There was a real cocktail called a "French 75" once fashionable in allied officer's clubs in WWI. It is made of gin, lemon juice, and sugar over ice, with champagne on top, garnished with cherry and lemon peel. It is named after the 75mil piece that was once the standby of the French artillery.
**Ironically it is ordered by a German officer despite the fact that some of his party were likely on the business end of the other kind of French 75 in the previous war. No accounting for taste.
***Not only was it a [[Crazy Prepared|good idea]] for someone like a Jew to stock up on jewelry if they might end up having to go on the lam in the turbulent and poisonous ideological politics before [[World War 2]] but Jews were forbidden by German law to take money with them across the borders. Jewelry is easy to hide and carries a lot of cash in a tiny mass and a quick visit to a money changer (if need be an illegal one) could get a lot. Thus the point about inflation in jewelry that the smuggler makes to a refugee trying to negotiate a passage is well taken.
***The local government was miserly with work permits for protectionistic reasons. Refugees did spend a disproportionate amount of time crowding the [[Local Hangout|Local Hangouts]] because there was not much else to do.
**[[Reality Is Unrealistic|It is perfectly possible]] for Gestapo agents to be roaming round Paris giving instructions before the German army arrived. Paris was an open city(see [[The Laws and Customs of War]]).
* [[Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids]]: Rick starts out nursing this view. It doesn't last, though.
* [[Slasher Smile]]: Conrad Veidt ([https://web.archive.org/web/20160923030006/http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/Conrad%20Veidt,%20from%20The%20Man%20Who%20Laughs.jpg whose face was the original model for] [[The Joker]]) has still got it.
* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism]]: Pretty much the point of the movie. "I suspect that under that cynical shell you are at heart a sentimentalist." Of course, Louis is right when he says that of Rick. And because [[Rousseau Was Right]], it turns out to be true of everyone, even the local crime lord and corrupt, lecherous Louis himself.
** Except [[Those Wacky Nazis|Strasser]], of course.
* [[Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped]]: Nazis are evil (less blatantly obvious at the time though it was generally agreed by then that they were [[Understatement|Not Nice People]]
* [[Stood Up]]: Rick at the train station at the end of the flashback.
* [[Theme Tune Cameo]]: "As Time Goes By" is now the official [[Vanity Plate]] jingle for [[Warner Bros]]
* [[Those Wacky Nazis]] - Not insane or out-and-out evil like modern views, but not good, obviously.
* [[Threshold Guardians]]: Rick, who has the [[MacGuffin|letters of transit]] that Victor and Ilsa need to leave Casablanca. Rick is perhaps one of the few [[Threshold Guardians]] in fiction to be [[The Protagonist]].
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**Several of the original actors including the Conrad Veidt playing Strassor were themselves refugees. Conrad was guilty of the "crime" of having a Jewish wife and had good reason to leave. He was so appreciated in his role that he became a go-to guy when a Nazi villain was desired.
**Captain Renault apparently has some counterparts at least now and probably then. The manager of the present day [[Defictionalization|Rick's]] tells in her memoir how her first bouncer got in trouble, first by getting a girl pregnant and then by falling afoul of the law. As a result the girl's family gave the police "a little something" to ensure that the bouncer had "special treatment" unless he agreed to a [[Shotgun Wedding]]. No doubt Captain Renault would be shocked that bribery is still going on.
***Not all Renaults were corrupt cops. One time a captain put into port with ten extra berths. He sold and resold passage to several times ten refugees. It [[Dude, Not Funny|sounds funnier in retrospect then it was at the time.]] Come to think of it [[Kick the Dog|it does not sound all that funny now.]] By chance, and perhaps not unsurprisingly he was connected to a number of slimy things including being a [[Cannon Fodder|stringer]] for a Balkan terrorist group. In any case the French police decided [[Sarcasm Mode|for some reason]] that they didn't like him and he fled with ten refugees one of whom was a woman paying the [[Unusual Euphemism|usual extra fee in Casablanca.]]
**And of course the City of Casablanca, besides being a pit stop on the refugee trail was like all neutral cities near the war zone a [[City of Spies]] in real life. One of the most delicate and interesting ops handled here was negotiating the defection of Vichy Leaders in preparation for the Torch invasion.
**The writers of the first of several drafts that were to evolve into ''Casablanca'' had their own Casablanca experience. They were a couple who had had the weird bad luck to visit cousins in Austria during the ''Anschless'' (Nazi coup in Austria). The local American Consul advised them to [[Diplomatic Impunity|wear an American flag lapel]] to avoid being attacked for being Jews, but it was at best a short-term solution. Their local kinfolk needed them to get their possessions out, so they made a [[Run for the Border]] loaded down with fur coats and expensive jewelry and basically whatever was portable. Somehow the guards did not spot them. In any event when they reached Marseilles they took a breather at a club remarkably like ''Rick's'' -- even including a black jazz pianist. When the couple got home they decided to devote themselves both to carrying the anti-Nazi message and telling their experience and thus was born the play ''Casablanca''.
* [[World War II]]: One of the classic films from this period - and, you know, revolving around it. It IS a propaganda movie, after all.
* [[Wretched Hive]]: The city of Casablanca itself.
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{{reflist}}
{{Academy Award Best Picture}}
{{AFI's 100 Years 100 Heroes and Villains}}
{{Best in Film: The Greatest Movies of Our Time}}
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[[Category:Films of the 1940s]]
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[[Category:Danny Peary Cult Movies List]]
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