Let’s talk about love.

Casablanca is brimming with portrayals of both negative and positive love: love of money, power, cruelty, and self vs. love of country, freedom, fidelity, and other people. And, of course, there is no shortage of romantic love. The film’s reputation relies on its love triangle plot. Who will get the girl in the end, her resistance-leading husband or her apparently neutral lover?

What complicates the love triangle is the backdrop of the war—Casablanca truly demonstrates the mantra that “desperate times call for desperate measures.” The film is crammed with nameless (as well as main) characters who are frantic to escape the war and find refuge in America, so they use and abuse each other in their fright, bartering everything they have—money, property, themselves, and their consciences—for chance opportunities for safety granted by slimy, double-dealing officials and black market smugglers. Yet time and again the film reminds its viewers that the shadow of war and destruction hovers over even the most promising escapes, the doom of that time swirling as a fog around the plane to Lisbon and as an unveiled threat of German conquest to even the New World across the Atlantic. What is one to do then in order to avoid annihilation? Would anyone accuse the person who sought his/her own safety before that of anyone else?

Casablanca’s love triangle: Victor, Ilsa, and Rick

In the midst of the film’s war-torn conflict stands its protagonist, Rick, the American café/casino owner who can’t return to America because of his shady past and can’t return to Europe because of his anti-fascist activities there. Though only a few specifics about Rick’s earlier actions are revealed to the movie’s viewers, it becomes clear that Rick has always taken the side of the underdog, of the oppressed—until Ilsa breaks his heart by abandoning him in Paris. After that, Rick claims a personal neutrality, claiming more than once, “I stick my neck out for nobody” and declaring to Ilsa, “I’m not fighting for anything anymore except myself. I’m the only Cause I’m interested in.”

On the flip side, Ilsa’s husband, Victor Laszlo, lives for “the cause.” Having repeatedly eluded the Nazis who relentlessly pursue him, Victor (whose name is close to “victory,” uncoincidentally) is consumed with exposing the cruelties and corruption of the Germans and with fomenting resistance to the Third Reich. He loves his wife, but he may love his mission more.

It would appear, therefore, that Ilsa has a choice of which man to love. She loves her husband Victor with a devotion born of admiration and awe, but she loves Rick with a passion born of what is supposedly true romantic love. Ilsa’s solution to her dilemma is to first abandon Rick in Paris as the Germans march into the city, then later to plan with Rick in Casablanca to break ties with her husband in order that she and Rick might never be separated again. Since this decision about how to sever ties with Victor is too overwhelming for her, Ilsa relinquishes control of her romantic life (and her morality) to Rick: “I can’t fight it anymore. I ran away from you once. I can’t do it again. Oh, I don’t know what’s right any longer. You have to think for both of us. For all of us.”

Rick does plot for all three people in the love triangle, but his resolution is surprising after his former insistence on putting himself and his desires first. Rick’s demonstration of love at the close of the film (spoiler alert!) pushes Ilsa firmly back to her husband and gives Victor the opportunity to continue to fight against the evil of the Nazi regime—even though Rick’s selfless act deprives him (and Ilsa) of happiness. In the end, the love that is still standing is two-fold: the love of freedom and the love of friendship. Rick’s relinquishing Ilsa (as well as his murder of Gestapo Major Heinrich Strasser) marks his entrance into the membership of resistance fighters, inspiring the corrupt (but hilarious) Captain Louis Renault to also renounce his former self-serving life and begin seeking a new calling under a new master. No longer will self dominate the concerns of these two men. Instead, they stroll off together into the fog, contemplating being new “patriots” and joining a group of French resistance fighters, Rick infamously declaring, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

For Me Then…

I’m not a huge fan of the love triangle that helps to make Casablanca the sentimental draw that it is. I can sympathize with Ilsa’s being lonely in Paris while Victor is in a concentration camp, but it seems abrupt and odd to me that she so quickly tumbles into a heavy romantic relationship with Rick upon learning of her husband’s supposed death. Of course, she then finds herself in quite a dilemma when she hears that Victor is still alive while she has come to love Rick. Abandonment seems to be a theme with her, a point that Rick notes when the ex-lovers are reunited in Casablanca. The fact that Ilsa intends to leave Victor again at the end of the film doesn’t score a lot of points for her character in my mind. In other words, I found it hard to root for her to end up in an adulterous relationship with Rick (unintentional in Paris but completely understood and premeditated in Casablanca). On the flip side, it’s undeniable that Ilsa clearly loves Rick more than she loves Victor; and it’s painful to see that, even though Victor is a heroic figure in the movement to oust the Nazis, his love for his wife is not his priority. Everything he does is for “the cause”—a noble quest, but perhaps a cold one for a young, lonely wife.

Hence, I kind of like it when the film ends with patriotism and friendship—although, again, it seems like Rick should be a little more broken up than he is. Casablanca’s attempt to indicate that a cause exists that is higher than romantic love is admirable, even though it may not be entirely convincing given the resolution of the love triangle. What is interesting is that the film’s title might help to explain its ending more satisfactorily. Not only indicating the setting of the movie’s storyline, “Casablanca” stands for the intense difficulties brought on by the devastation of a war unlike any the world had seen before. What would normally have been a taboo relationship becomes sympathetic under conditions of the early 1940s. Decisions that would otherwise have been inconceivable had to be made daily. Where personal gain use to reign supreme, now the greater good—the survival of democracy and the innocent—must hold sway. As Rick tells Ilsa, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Yet ironically, the film employs the story of “three little people” to make the point that individual conflicts pale in comparison to worldwide crisis. In the end, the fog of the war overtakes everything, and people must deal with that haze before they can consider themselves.