Casablanca is a Calvinist movie with a Catholic setting. Written by secular Jewish leftists Howard Koch, Phillip and Julius Epstein, directed by Hungarian immigrant Michael Curtiz, and starring the iconic and very Protestant American actor Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca takes place in the limbo of the Moroccan city of Casablanca. There refugees from all over war torn Europe await their fate. Will they be allowed to board a plane for Lisbon, and from there to continue on to the promised land of the United States, or will they languish in their North African purgatory, eventually to return to whatever Nazi occupied country they have so recently escaped.
Among these refugees is Annina Brandel, a teenage Bulgarian woman played by the 18-year-old Joy Page, not incidentally the step-daughter of studio boss Jack Warner, and her husband Jan, played by the Austrian, anti-Nazi youth leader, and former concentration camp inmate, Helmut Dantine. Unlike Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund, the Brandels are not important enough to have to worry about being detained by the Germans. They have a more mundane problem. They’re broke, too broke to have the money to bribe corrupt officials for an exit visa while paying their fare to the United States. Captain Renault, the real villain of Casablanca, makes Annina an offer. If she fucks him, he’ll let her have the exit visa free of charge. Annina agrees, reluctantly. Letting Captain Renault fuck her will allow she and her husband to get out of Casablanca, but it also means living with a horrible secret.
When Annina goes to Rick Blaine to plead her case, she is not unaware of the effect her good looks have on men. Rick may be cynical and disillusioned with the anti-fascist cause, but he’s well aware of exactly what the slimy little Frenchman is doing. In December of 1941, Bulgaria was not occupied by German troops, but its leader, Tsar Boris III, had been bullied into an alliance with the Axis. “Things are very bad there,” she says. “The devil has the people by the throat.” Bulgaria, like Casablanca, is in a state of sin. Louis Renault is not the devil. He’s something much worse, a man aware of his sinful nature who has consciously made the decision not to resist evil, but to profit from evil. Rick in turn knows that he is complicit, that his livelihood depends on staying on the good side of the Vichy authorities, even when it means turning over an underage refugee girl to be sexually exploited. His response to Annina’s plea is the the first step on the road to his redemption. Instead of merely telling Annina that yes Captain Renault will keep his side of the one fuck for one exit visa side of the bargain, Rick goes out to the casino, where Jan is playing Roulette, to instruct his croupier Emil to let the young Bulgarian win enough money to pay for the visa and the trip to the United States.
If Victor Laszlo is Casablanca’s vision of Jesus, the tall, handsome torture survivor, dressed all in white, uncompromising in his principled opposition to fascism, then Rick Blaine is Casablanca’s stern Calvinist, Old Testament God. The casino is rigged. Whether Jan wins enough money at roulette to take his wife out of limbo to the promised land has nothing to do with whether or not he is a good person, or even if he’s good at roulette. Quite the contrary, it is only when Annina enters into a state of sin, agrees to fuck Captain Renault and betray her husband, that Rick, played by the brooding Dutch Anglo Puritan Bogart, decides on a whim that they belong to the elect and not the damned. Do Jan and Annina deserve salvation any more than the other refugees in Casablanca? Not really, the movie implies. While Annina’s youth and uncorrupted appearance may have played some part in influencing Rick’s decision, it is her confession of her sinful, corrupted nature and her desire to keep her husband in the dark about her deal with the devil, that ultimately moves him. “Nobody ever loved me that much,” he says to Eve determined to let Adam remain in a state of innocence.” The roulette wheel is rigged. Winners and losers predetermined by a mysterious God, but that mysterious God can be moved by a frank acknowledgement of the the state of sin common to us all.
Casablanca does indeed languish in a state of sin, but the arrival of Victor Laszlo and Ilse Lund upsets the deal Rick had made with Captain Renault, the deal where Louis would allow Rick to maintain his corrupt gambling establishment in exchange for free drinks, ready access to nubile teenage refugees, and Emil’s help in supplementing his meager police captain’s salary. Once Rick remembers what he was like before the fall, the time he spent with the gorgeous Ilsa Lund in Paris, and Ingrid Bergman in 1942 did indeed look like God’s grace personified, he realizes that he cannot continue pretending to himself that treating his employees at the casino well makes up for the fact that he’s a fascist collaborator profiting off of a rigged gambling establishment. Rick’s self-pity and bitterness on Ilsa’s arrival in Casablanca has as much to do with his anger over being offered salvation, the hard bitter road of anti-fascism that has cost Victor Laszlo so much, as it does with romantic disappointment. Laszlo, like Jesus, has come to bring, not peace, but a sword. Laszlo is an ineffectual Christ. His power depends on Rick’s cooperation, but when he leads the sinners in the café in a thundering rendition of La Marseillaise, the anthem of secular liberal salvation, Satan, the German Luftwaffe officer Major Strasser, orders his proxy on earth to cancel the bargain. It is then that Claude Raines utters probably the most famous line in all of cinema.
“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
Rarely has the Calvinist state of sin been summed up in such a witty, self-deprecating way. Captain Renault is a genuinely evil man trafficking defenseless Eastern European women to himself. But generations of movie goers have forgiven him his mustache twirling villainy because he sums up so succinctly what we all know. The world is an evil place and in this evil place we all do what we need to do to get by. When the devil has the people by the throat, the people need to negotiate with the devil. Nevertheless, there is a way of out of the state of sin, the “letters of transit,” an all powerful exit visa signed by God himself, Charles de Gaulle, that renders devils, Satan’s minions, Germans and French collaborators, helpless before their almighty power. That Charles de Gaulle had no power in Morocco in 1941 is irrelevant. Once Rick Blaine, who symbolizes the United States as well as the sinful every man, commits himself to the anti-fascist cause, it’s only a matter of time before North Africa, and eventually Western Europe, is liberated from the Nazis and returned back to, well, the United States, the British and French Empire, but I guess we can’t have it all. De Gaulle and Eisenhower are a marginal improvement over Hitler and Mussolini.
But let me not be a woke joyless ultra-leftist about all of it. Victor Laszlo, Ilsa Lund, and the cast of Casablanca — all of whom were refugees from Nazi occupied Europe except for Joy Page, Bogart and Dooley Wilson — are not going back to the real United States, to Jim Crow, monopoly capitalism and the bad memories of the Great Depression, but to Golden Age Hollywood, which was indeed a magical, and quite leftist, place back in 1942. They actually made something other than superhero movies and Star Wars reboots if you can believe it. Helmut Dantine spent 3 months in a concentration camp as a teenager and went onto study at UCLU, which must have seemed a bit like paradise. The final scenes of Casablanca are not realistic, therefore, but poetic, shot not on location, but at a studio where the lighting and sets could be perfectly controlled. Rick has admitted to himself that his time in Paris was a brief state of grace given to sinful man on the whim of their Calvinist God, not something he could, or should try to hold onto. The point was not get married and live happily ever after but to take the first step on the road to salvation, which in December of 1941, meant fighting the Nazis. You might die or end up in a concentration camp, but like Victor Laszlo you might slip your chains to continue the fight. By giving up Ilsa, and letting go of his hurt pride, Rick not only saves himself, but also Captain Renault, who throws a bottle of Vichy Water in the trash, and walks off with Rick to the headquarters of the French Resistance in far off Brazzaville. That it’s going to be a long, long walk is entirely the point. The road to salvation is very long, and very hard.