Casablanca- Isaac Richter

1942

Directed by Michael Curtiz

I took a class last semester called Gender Images in Media in which we studied about gender roles and the roles of different sterotypes in film and other media, and part of the class was to look at the big stars of the 1930's and 1940's, ranging from Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Jimmy Cagney, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and so many others. After that class, I started rwatching films with a lot of these actors, and the one I wa actively pursuing the mos for a while is Humphrey Bogart, mainly because he was the star of my favorite film from the 1940's. That film is Casablanca, the famous romantic WWII drama about Rick Blaine, a cynical American cafe owner in Casablanca (French Morocco) trying to stay out of politics or any kind of business that will get him too involved. His heart was broken by a woman he met in Paris. Before that, he was a passionate man ready to do his part to help this war, but after this woman left him, he's been guarding his heart so carefully that nothing affects him, that is, until the woman who left him in Paris, Ilsa Lund, arrives in his cafe in Casablanca with her husband Victor Laszlo, a wanted activist who as managed to escape every situation he's ever encountered, and he'll need Rick's help to get out of this one, but will he find it in his heart to help the woman who betrayed him, and the man she betrayed him for.

Casablanca makes good use of Humphrey Bogart's persona. His characters are self-reliant, skeptical, smooth and usually tough-as-nails. He's usually very stiff in the way he acts, which works with his sarcastic, cynical personna that he displays as Rick Blaine. Sarcasm drips out of his moth so effortlessly, and only he can give "Here's looking at you kid" the right mix of secure self-reliance and passionate romanticism, without even havingto change his tone. Bogie has always had to work with a partially paralyzed mouth (caused by an explosion on his face during his time in the Navy), so his lip movements have always been limited, and he's had that slight impairment in his speech, but he managed to make that work in his personna.

Humphrey Bogart was typically cast as a film noir hero. His personna included the hat and the coat, and walking toward the shadows in films such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. A Humphrey Bogart film meant that he was going to meet a woman, be skeptical of her, but ultimately fall madly in love with her, he would talk to his superiors with sarcasm and even anger a few people he shouldn't anger, and in the end, he would have to face these people, or the women who typically betray him. A trademark of a Humphrey Bogart film is to see him pointing a gun at someone, which can be seen in many of his film noirs, and is also present in Casablanca toward the end when he's pointing a gun at Captain Renault to get him to keep quiet while he puts Laszlo and Ilsa on the plane, and he also uses it to shoot Major Strassar of the Third Reich. This was put into the film at the last minute, because the writers agreed that people love watching Humphrey Bogart shoot the bad guy. Bogie also had experience playing the evil gangster, since he was typecat in those roles before becoming "Bogie", the smooth, sarcastic man who is really a romantic at heart.

Bogie departed from this personna in his later films, like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where he played a desperate begger who finds an opportunity to hunt for treasure, and in The African Queen, he played a dirtier version of his own personna (since most of his characters are clean-cut and stylish), but the audience knew what to expect from Humphrey Bogart, and in Casablanca, a film that has miraculously lived beyond its time, the audience gets the smooth, cynical, clean-cut womanizer, with a cigarette in his hand, we get the passionate romantic side of him in the Paris scenes, and in the scenes where he finally forgives Ilsa, and we see the hero in his personna, the guy who takes action, points a gun at the right people to help those who need help. He's the guy who is always on top of things, even when he's trying to avoid everything around him, and even when he makes a mistake, or is being played by a woman, when people see Humphrey Bogart, they expect to see a man who is in control of hi emotions and will do everything to protect those who need to be protected.