by Oliver Spicer
Rick’s Bar is one example of this, which is the central location and holds its own carefree ambiance in the ever tense narrative. This carefree attitude can be seen as an extension of Rick’s own personality, who does not break his role as owner for anyone’s problems and keeps a cynical wit that belongs more in a sitcom than a story about war fugitives and the Nazi occupation of Colonial France.
Tinny piano music, customers of various nationalities crowded together, the blend of American and Moroccan architecture, and the combination of French table lights, oil lamps, and shuttered windows that justify the perfect Hollywood lighting on each character. These all immerse the spectator into one of the most recognisable settings in Classical Hollywood. The mood of the bar even remains unchanged after one of the fugitive, who tries to get Rick’s help to no avail, is shot at the inciting incident of the narrative. Chatter returns and Rick sticks to his self prescribed doctrine.
In fact the seminal mood shift in the film comes after Rick (Humphrey Bogart) recognizes his past love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) at his own bar, who abounded him at a train station in Paris before he came to Morocco. It takes until the subsequent scene for the shift in mood, with Rick drinking in the dark - only accompanied by the club’s piano player Sam (Dooley Wilson).
Here, the bustle of the crowded bar is now stillness - emphasised by the sound of Rick pouring and settling down a Whisky Bottle that echoes through the bar in the first shot of the sequence. All of the practical lighting, the facades of happiness, are gone - replaced only by the moonlight through the windows and a searchlight than scans through the streets outside.
Rick stares at the table, sighing and closing his eyes before taking a deep sip of his whisky. A motif of drinking is carried from the previous scenes but no have an alternate tone. Rick previously broke one of his rule to never drink with customers in order to sit with Ilsa, and his continuation shows he wants to be numbed from the reaction of seeing her again.
Rick sitting alone also links with the introductory shot of his character playing chess against himself, but with the cunning and intelligence of ricks character being switched out for a lack of control and hopelessness. Umberto Eco writes how Rick fits into the archetype of a ‘Redeemed Drunkard’, with this scene acting a low point in his arc that he must recover form.
A sharp key light to act as the moonlight illuminates Rick’s features in a new way compared to the sparkling lights of the busy bar: casting half his face in darkness and creating a monstrous tone when combined with his blank stare into nothingness. As the camera dollies back to a long shot of the empty bar, the walls and decoration blend into one dark frame that borders the image - showing rick as a lone figure surrounded by darkness.
There is no cut away as Sam enters and calls out ‘Boss?’, with a long take for the subsequent dialogue creating a tone of still contemplation that is found in Bogarts performance.
It is noteworthy to point out that Casablanca is an adaptation of a play called ‘Everybody comes to Rick’s’, which explained why the single main location of the bar is used. And the reflective tone can also be explained through the position of this scene in the original play as just before the intermission, where the contemplative tone can linger in the minds of the audiences before the beginning of the next act.
Even as Sam and Rick share an argument formed by a quick lines of dialogue on whether they should go to sleep, Rick does not turn to face him. An inversion of how previously the bar had been a reflection of his own personality, he has now become part of the bar - as still as the empty tables and seats that surround him. But his white dress jacket refuses him to blend into his environment, it sticks out just as it had compared to the other customers - he is not truly present in the scene, lamenting on the past.
If it were not for the searchlight that moves through the background of the shot, the shadows on his face would stay exactly the same. The shooting script for the film explains how the searchlight is a technique to “create a mood of unreality that will make the flashback a plausible device”, with this scene leading onto the explanation of Ilsa and Rick’s romantic past.
And although the searchlight succeeds in creating a dreamy aesthetic that justifies the break from temporal continuity for the first time in the film, it also creates a eerie or supernatural effect - with the block of light that floats through the set and reflecting off the props resembling a ghost that moves throughout the scene.
This could be read as a haunting of Rick’s mind with the past, but looking at the military connotations of the searchlight can produce a more complex result. Searchlights were used to prevent bombing raids in planes, lighting up battlefields, and blinding enemy troops in the Second World War where Casablanca is set in the middle of - just before America’s entry. The war connotation grounds the scene in the period, showing how even when ruminating on past love - the conflict is ever present.
Comparing the movement of the searchlight to the crowded bar in previous scenes, the searchlight can be seen as a representation of the customers themselves - who are souls displaced from their home due to the impact of the Second World War that drift through Rick’s Bar as a form of purgatory before reaching Lisbon and the hope of being in a free country.
Although this is the pivotal shift in the mood of the film, these ideas of purgatory are shown in the opening monologue that states:
“Here, the fortunate ones through money, or influence, or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon; and from Lisbon, to the New World. But the others wait in Casablanca... and wait... and wait... and wait.“
In this moment Rick realises he is as helpless as the customers he entertained, stuck in Casablanca and unable to escape his suffering in the form of a past lover.
Rick’s subsequent dialogue supports his stubbornness through the quick and short line of ‘I know she’s coming back.’ The camera then comes back in for a close up as Bogart delivers some of the most significant lines in the scene, and some of the most quoted pieces of dialogue in all of cinema.
First, he asks Sam the cryptic phrase ‘if it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York’?. Released in January 1943 just before the Allied invasion of North Africa, the narrative takes place a year earlier just a few days before the Pearl Harbour attacks that caused the American entry into the war. This stitches together the isolationist principles of pre-war America that made them hesitant to join the Allies with Rick’s uncaring attitude towards his customer’s problems.
Rick then states ‘I bet they’re asleep in America, I bet they’re asleep all over New York’ before slamming his fist into the table. Peter Hogue writes that this is Rick stating “wake up” to the idea of “political commitment” about the overseas war. However Rick’s deep stare into the distance and emotive delivery suggests a deeper meaning that he is slowly accepting and regretting his current situation, envious of his possible life if he were in America and the lack of trouble it would bring. The bar owner who has seen hundreds of lost souls float through, now accepts he is one among them.
Finally, Rick raises his head from the table and gives us the iconic line ‘of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine?’. It’s a plea questioning his suffering and questioning the cause and effect chain that brought him to this situation. Cause and effect is prominent in the easy to understand plot of Casablanca (Rick is left the transit papers, Ugarte is shot, Ilsa needs to talk to Rick...) and also for the events that lead up to Americas’ entry into the war that began long before the attacks on Pearl Harbour.
Rick presses his hands in his face with grief, pulling them away only to order Sam to play ‘As time goes by’ - which in repetition throughout the film becomes a leitmotif of Rick and Ilsa’s relationship. He asks in a manner that suggests it is torturous for him to hear, exclaiming ‘If she can stand it, I can!’.
A dolly heightens the emotions, with the searchlight coming round once again and allowing the audience to see Rick’s glassy eyes as he holds back tears. Unlike the stillness of his performance in the beginning of the scene, Rick seems restless by moving his lips and grasping for his drink and cigarettes - distracting himself from the past.
As the camera performs another dolly in to a close up, a non-diegetic string score that matches and elevates Sam’s playing comes in - heightening the emotions further and preparing the spectator for the break in continuity in the subsequent flashback sequence.
Finally, the image of Rick begins to blur as he exhales his smoke - resembling the tears in his eyes, introducing the idea of going into Rick’s perspective. Then a cross dissolve into a shot of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which starts blurry and becomes sharp as we see the early moment of Rick and Ilsa’s relationship.
by Oliver Spicer, December 2023.