Along with Gone with the Wind and Citizen
Kane, Casablanca is probably the greatest
example of the classic Hollywood film. Shot entirely on Hollywood
sets, using studio actors, directors, and writers, Casablanca perfectly
displays the art of collaborative studio production, rather than
the vision of a single, independent auteur. With its black-and-white
earnestness, hardboiled male lead, and beautiful, demure heroine,
it is a paradigmatic film from Hollywood's golden age. The story
itself is straightforward, but the film is hardly simplistic, partly
because of its unresolvable central conflict and partly because
it functions as both a realistic movie and a political allegory.
The film's lasting enchantment is due to its dramatic conclusion.
Casablanca may be a classic Hollywood
film, but it lacks a classic Hollywood ending, in which everyone
rides happily into the sunset. For Casablanca to
fit this outline, Ilsa would have to declare her love for either
Laszlo or Rick and leave with her choice, and the rejected male
would let her go without a struggle because his love was so great
that above all else he wished for her happiness. Casablanca's ending
resembles the classic ending, but it has been twisted and complicated.
In the standard Hollywood film, no conflict would arise
between the political and the personal. Love and political idealism
would go hand in hand, and no painful choices would be necessary.
The conclusion of Casablanca involves much more
than the triumph of the idealistic values of sacrifice and restraint,
and Casablanca is much more than pro-Allied propaganda.
If the film concluded with the simple message that victory requires
sacrifice, then the ending would be a happy one. Rick's decision
to let Ilsa leave with Laszlo would privilege long-term concerns
over short-term ones. In exchange for love today, victory and freedom
will prevail in the future. Laszlo may think of his actions similarly.
He will sacrifice himself today by suffering imprisonment in concentration
camps and constantly running, in exchange for a better future. Such
calculations are consistent with the classic Hollywood happy ending, and,
indeed, Laszlo does get the girl in the end, just as we might expect.
For Rick and Ilsa, however, the conclusion is neither
as happy nor as simple. Not only do the lovers have to split up
a second time, but neither truly knows what the other is thinking.
Laszlo undoubtedly loves Ilsa, but Rick's and Ilsa's feelings aren't
so clear. The film demonstrates the moral value of sacrifice and
the triumph of the political over personal desire, but the final
scene is full of ambiguity. Ilsa's true preference for Rick or Laszlo
remains a mystery. She suggests that her preference is for Rick
when she visits him in his apartment to ask for the letters of transit,
but her potential ulterior motive, to do what it takes to get the
letters so her true love, Laszlo, can flee to safety, adds an element
of doubt to what she says and does. In the final scene at the airport,
Ilsa may fail to declare her love for Rick because Laszlo is never
far from earshot, but she may also refrain from declaring her love
because she doesn't want to lie again. She leaves with Laszlo in
the end, but in a way, Rick has forced this decision on her, and
which of them she truly loves remains a mystery.
Rick's feelings are almost equally ambiguous. He seems
to truly love Ilsa, and his final gesture, when he not only lets
Laszlo and Ilsa leave together but tries to patch things up between
them by telling Laszlo about Ilsa's visit the previous evening,
seems a courageous act of self-sacrifice. Yet we can't know with
any certainty that Rick hasn't gotten over Ilsa. Perhaps he realized
he couldn't compete against the war hero Laszlo and gave up on her,
or perhaps all he really needed from Ilsa before he could move on
was to hear her say she still loved him. Rick's final gesture could
also be in part an act of revenge, payback for Ilsa's having abandoned
him. Perhaps Rick wants to send her into a life of loneliness and
solitary whiskey drinking, the same life that he himself has been
leading ever since being abandoned at the Paris train station a
year earlier.
Rick finds some consolation in his friendship with Louis.
Rick is not substituting one relationship with another here—he is
substituting one type of relationship with another.
Ilsa and Rick's relationship is one based in romantic love, while
Rick and Louis's relationship has been and still is one of expediency
and political alliance, even if they have now added an element of
genuine personal affection. Rick's substitution of Louis for Ilsa
at the end of the film underscores the idea in Casablanca that
politics trump romantic love, and the public is of greater significance
than the personal.
We can only speculate on Rick's and Ilsa's true feelings
and motives, and the point is that the ending remains a mystery.
It is neither happy nor sad, but both at once, and far from the
kind of ending one might expect from a typical 1940s
Hollywood film.
