Love Wins Out Over War in "Casablanca"
it`s ensuring that he wins at Rick`s roulette table or appeasing Germans, he does not want any petty problems of conscience infesting his soul. Rains has always been an interesting actor (Notorious, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), mainly because he does not play his villains in the usual manner. He does not really play them as villains, but as people whose true feelings are in conflict with the need to act the "proper" role. In Notorious, he was a Nazi who truly cared for Ingrid Bergman, in Mr. Smith, he was a senator whose principles were long ago poisoned due to the overall corrupt political atmosphere of the Senate, and in this movie, he is seduced by the corruptible nature of his position, even though we get the sense that he is not really a bad guy.
As I watched this, I was struck with the odd feeling that this movie was meant to be something else entirely, and that time has transcended the original origins of the film into something more universal, more exclusively romantic. Casablanca was made during the middle of the war, and knowing this fact colours much of the movie`s content. In a sense, the film is expert wartime propaganda, meant to direct our emotions toward something larger, and more demanding, than silly love affairs. The story was a unique way to make the point that there is things larger than our petty personal concerns, and that is echoed in Bogart`s famous final speech to Bergman. His point is that the problems of three people don`t matter a hill of beans in this crazy world - and the message was as much for the audience as it was for Ingrid Bergman. By succumbing to love, these people will create damage upon that free world by ignoring the threat. And at the same time, we must push away our own petty concerns and think of the people who are trying to bring good to the horror that is the war against Germany. (I would see this as the happy opposition to that of Fassbinder`s The Marriage of Maria Braun, in which post-WWII Germans are asked to dump their own regret and shame over the loss of the war, and replace it with unfeeling, selfish, greedy opportunism.).
But like all well-made films, Casablanca is better than mere propaganda. The film has transcended time because of the romantic sacrifice, and that is
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